Little Darlings

by Melanie Golding

  On the first day, they surveyed the vast search area, using a diving camera to photograph everything that lay under the surface of the reservoir, where the drowned village of Selverton once thrived. The images showed mostly piles of rubble, but also several buildings that were untouched, preserved, with furniture floating around as if in a broken snow globe.

  Thrupp put the brakes on the investigation when he learned how extensive the search would have to be.

  “It’s a historic case,” he said. “We can’t afford to direct resources to it, not when there’s so much else happening right now that we need to cover.”

  Harper remained calm, though she wanted to scream with frustration. “This is a new murder investigation, historic or not,” she said. “We should prioritise it for that reason.”

  “Do you have evidence to prove it was murder, not an accident?”

  Harper had to admit that she did not. The body was unidentified, and didn’t immediately appear to relate to any missing-persons case they could find in any police archive. Damage to the bones would need to be assessed by a specialist, to determine whether injuries occurred before or after death. Harper felt that she didn’t need to wait to read the forensic pathologist’s report. She just knew it was a bad death, preventable, and unjust. The bones themselves seemed angry to her.

  “You’ve got a week,” he said, “and that’s it. Unless we find something to identify the body, or something that points to foul play.”

  A week wasn’t anywhere near long enough, especially with the scratch team she’d been assigned. She needed someone who would be able to research the history, maybe find some people with connections to Selverton. Amy was the obvious person to ask, but the thought of contacting her again after how they’d left things at Patrick Tranter’s house didn’t appeal. Harper had already ignored two of the journalist’s text messages, and quite liked the feeling of being the one in control. But, the case needed a researcher, and there was no denying that Amy was good at her job. Great, actually. And Harper didn’t have a lot of time to play with.

  “Leave it with me,” she’d said to Thrupp. “If there’s anything to be found, I’ll make sure it is.” Even if I have to swallow my pride to get it done, she thought. Later she stared at her phone for a long time before she finally called the journalist and laid out what she needed her to do. Amy said yes, of course she would help, and after the call Harper felt OK, surprisingly. They’d both kept things very professional. And she had to admit, despite everything, that it was good to hear Amy’s voice again.

  Three days later, Harper was standing on the shore when she looked up from examining the objects her divers had recovered to see Amy, tottering across the mud and stones towards her in her heels, clutching a plastic binder filled with papers.

  “Where did you find all this?” asked Harper, when they’d spread the findings on the table in the police operations vehicle they were using as a base.

  “Easy,” said Amy. “There’s a museum dedicated to Selverton and the New Riverby reservoir. It’s tiny, and it only opens for half a day on a Tuesday. Otherwise I’d have got it sooner.”

  Tony Fisher, who ran the museum, was the great-great-nephew of the Mr Fisher who had owned the Selverton mill, which was the main employer for the village before it was drowned. The Fishers owned the mill for generations, but when the news came that the valley was to be flooded they shut the business down and moved to Manchester.

  “Makes sense,” said Harper. “The man’s got a business to run.”

  “True, but the Water Board gave the villagers four years to clear out. He could have kept the mill running for at least some of that time. It ripped the heart right out of Selverton, at the exact time when the families about to be displaced needed more than anything to keep earning for as long as possible. Selverton was a sinking ship, and Fisher was the proverbial rat. Tony says his great-great-uncle wasn’t too popular after that.”

  Amy slid a glossy volume over to Harper. The title of the book was Diaries of a Mill Owner: The Truth About Selverton Village and the New Riverby Reservoir. It ran to four hundred and seventy-five pages.

  “Did you read the whole of this?” said Harper.

  Amy shook her head. “Don’t be silly. I just asked Tony if there was any mention of a missing girl, and he led me straight to the relevant parts.”

  She indicated the first bookmark, and Harper opened the book and began to read.

  Fourteenth of May, 1895.

  I hear from Cook at Bishopton Hall that Betty Fairweather, who worked the looms at the Selverton mill with her father (God rest his soul), is missing. No one has seen her these three weeks last. She asks if the girl has been to me, to seek work at the mill, as by all accounts she did not find the Hall an agreeable place to work, though I can’t think why. She was more fortunate than many of the Selverton mill girls in finding employment so quickly. I admitted that I hadn’t seen her or heard tell of her. I cannot shake a feeling that no good has come to the child.

  “Did Fisher try to find her?” said Harper.

  Amy shook her head, and opened the pages at another bookmark, a later entry.

  Twenty-third of July, 1895.

  Today I was visited by Billy Rowles, one of the boys from Selverton village. He asked for work and I was able to oblige. I enquired as to whether he had heard any news of young Betty, since they were at school together. Without a trace of shame he told me a filthy rumour, some nonsense about Lord Pincher getting her in trouble before she went missing. For that I almost sent him on his way, but at the last minute I thought better of it. The boy was only repeating what he’d overheard in some dirty backroom of a public house. Still, it set my mind at rest about the poor girl’s fate. The truth is no doubt far more prosaic: Betty probably got into trouble with a stable boy or some such, then ran away to hide her disgrace. Girls are so wayward these days.

  Neither of the women spoke as they took this in. Harper’s opinion of Fisher took a sharp nosedive.

  “Is there any more?”

  “No,” said Amy, “that’s the last mention of Betty.”

  “Did you manage to find her in the city records?”

  “I did. There’s a birth certificate, but no death certificate, which means it’s possible that the bones you found belong to her. But I’m afraid the trail stops there. Betty was an only child of two only children.”

  “So there’s no way to compare our skeleton with Betty’s relatives, to check for familial DNA.”

  “Not unless you dig up the parents.”

  Harper knew that Thrupp wouldn’t authorise that. The case had hit a dead end, with nothing to go on but a fourth-hand account of a girl who might or might not have gone missing, more than a hundred years ago. The lack of a death certificate wasn’t evidence, either: the fact was that Betty Fairweather could have simply left the area, got married and had a happy life, and her death would have been registered under another name in a different county. Without a budget for serious amounts of expensive research, they would never know. Harper went back to the edge of the reservoir, deflated about her chances of solving the case.

  From Amy she’d learned a bit about the history of the reservoir itself. “Drowned village” was an emotive term, but really the village would already have been evacuated, half-derelict when the flooding began. The Water Board dropped the dam gates sometime in 1895, trapping the river Selver, but it took a year to fill. The New Riverby crept higher every day, eventually subsuming the remains of the buildings. What was a post office, now a lakebed. Where once the schoolhouse stood, fish began to make their home. A slow drowning. This woman, trapped and buried in the lake, most probably wasn’t killed by the lake itself. She must have been lying dead somewhere in the village before the water rose over her.

  Harper approached the black box of remains and took out the skull. Small and delicate, there was a hole at the base which could have been caused by a blow to the head, or as easily by a falling rock at any time in the century it had bee
n under water. She held the skull carefully in her hands, trying to visualise the person to whom it belonged.

  The tip of the church caught her eye then, piercing the surface. The only other time that weathervane had been seen since the drowning, another pair of twins had been threatened, those of Victoria Settle. It was almost as if there was something in the lake, that could only get out when the old village was revealed. That something was angry, and it wanted justice. Perhaps it also wanted to be taken care of; to be laid to rest.

  “Hello, Betty,” said Harper, and immediately she swore she felt something shift in the air, a release of tension. Soon, it began to rain.

  * * *

  That evening, Harper walked into the pub half-expecting to be stood up, but Amy was already there, immaculately dressed in a fifties-style dress with a full skirt and bodice.

  “You look nice,” said Amy, raising half an eyebrow at the box-fresh creases in the black T-shirt Harper had chosen.

  “So do you,” said Harper, sitting down and inhaling that floral perfume, telling herself it was too cloying anyway. “Shall I get drinks? I’m buying. I’ve got to thank you for all your help with the research.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” said Amy. “Research is one of my skills. Though I have many.” She gave a slow, flirtatious blink that Harper pretended not to see.

  “Many skills,” said Harper, “hmm. You’ve certainly got a way with interviewees. From what I saw at Patrick Tranter’s house, anyway.”

  A puzzled expression crossed Amy’s face. “I’m not sure what you’re thinking, but you’ve got it completely wrong.”

  “I don’t know, Amy. What could I possibly be thinking, finding you at a man’s house looking like you’d just got out of the shower?”

  “I had just got out of the shower. The one at the gym, where I’d just come from. Why, what did you think was going on?”

  Harper paused, suddenly unsure. But she’d started now.

  “Look, it’s nothing to do with me, what you need to do to get the job done. Even if sleeping with interviewees is not entirely ethical.”

  Amy’s mouth dropped open. “You’re joking, right?”

  There was a silence in which both women sipped from their drinks and looked in opposite directions. Harper tried to relax her shoulders; she could feel herself tensing up.

  “If you must know,” said Amy, “he invited me round, so I thought he might have something useful to tell me about our case. He didn’t, though. In the end he just kept trying to sell me a marketing package for my freelance work.”

  “But why were you still there the next day?”

  Amy nearly choked on a mouthful of drink. “The next day? You think I’d been there all night?”

  Harper studied Amy’s face. She wanted to believe her, so badly.

  “But you said you couldn’t come with me to the old people’s home to see Victoria because you had an interview. I thought—I had a feeling—that you weren’t telling the truth. You never answered your phone, or sent me a message. And then the next day, there you were, in his kitchen. It was a complete shock. I just thought—”

  “That is quite a leap.”

  Now that she’d said it out loud, it did seem ridiculous to Harper. Amy and Patrick? She just couldn’t picture it. She started to feel rather silly.

  “Oh, Amy, I’m such an idiot. I don’t know what to say …”

  “He is so not my type,” said Amy, twirling her straw and licking a grain of salt from her margarita.

  “So where were you? The night before, I mean.”

  Amy dropped her eyes. Harper said, “You don’t have to tell me. I’m sorry, I’m being a dick.”

  Concentrating on her fingers as they picked at the edge of her beermat, Amy said, “No, it’s fine. You were right, I wasn’t seeing an interviewee. I was moving my stuff out of my partner’s place. My ex-partner’s place.”

  Harper felt her cheeks glow red-hot, and lifted her glass to her face to cool it.

  At the end of the evening, Harper had drawn close to Amy, who had gazed amusedly into her eyes. But at the last second, she’d panicked, swerved, kissed Amy’s cheek and practically ran away. She’d completely blown it. No, she wouldn’t be calling Amy for a few weeks yet. Not until the sting of the shame of that pathetic encounter had faded. But even so, there was hope there, and a sense of possibility: Amy had sent her a text message afterwards, a red lipstick kiss emoticon, followed by a single x.

  As the sun set on the final day of evidence gathering, Harper stood on the shore where Lauren had stood a few weeks previously, looking out at the water. Harper had done all she could for this poor dead woman with only her bones surviving. The black box containing the remains was a few metres away, waiting to be taken by the undertakers and laid to rest elsewhere. The case itself would stay open, filed as unsolved until evidence emerged to prove beyond a doubt who this woman was, and how she came to lie in the New Riverby reservoir for all this time, undiscovered. Harper would move on to the next case, but she felt this would be one of those she’d find it hard to forget; partly because it was linked in her mind with that other tragic case, Lauren Tranter’s.

  During drinks, Amy had asked her about it. “You really had a thing for that case, didn’t you?”

  Harper nodded mutely.

  “Why do you think that was?”

  A first date was not the time to bring up heavy subjects, so Harper had made a few vague noises about feeling sorry for Lauren, and the fact that Victoria Settle’s case seemed to suggest a link, that it had happened before. Then, knowing she hadn’t really answered the question, she’d gone to the bar and bought them both another drink. When she got back to the table, although Amy’s journalistic instinct must have been urging her to dig deeper, she’d allowed Harper to move the conversation on. One day, I’ll tell you, thought Harper. But perhaps the right occasion would never come. She would leave it, for now, anyway. Let Amy think there was some history there, a painful past involving a pregnancy, because that was certainly part of the truth. The rest would come out, in time. She was pretty sure there would be time.

  In a way, Harper felt fraudulent in feeling that her baby was lost: she knew exactly where Ruby was. She spoke to her at least twice a month. The story of Harper’s lost baby was one of transformation, just like Lauren’s. Lauren Tranter had looked at her babies and seen something no one else could. No matter how hard she tried to trick herself not to, every time Harper looked at the person the world insisted was her sister, she saw only her own child.

  The divers were about to come in when one of them signalled that he had found something else, buried in the clay. He waded towards the shore, cradling two small bundles in his arms. The bundles were grey with river mud and wrapped in dark rags. Rags, she thought, exactly like those she had found at the riverside when the twins were taken. Exactly like the scraps in the bushes outside Lauren’s window.

  On the grid Harper had created, showing the exact location of each bone, the diver with the bundles indicated that he had found them in the same square where they had found the mystery woman’s pelvis and the lower half of her spine. Harper watched as the pathologist carefully picked up the two small bodies so lovingly wrapped and buried, mummified in the silt, each no bigger than her two cupped hands. She placed them in the box and closed the lid.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  A woman, as she heard tell, had a child changed, and one, a poor thing, left in his place, but she was very kind to it, and every morning on getting up she found a small piece of money in her pocket. My informant firmly believes in their existence, and wonders how it is that of late years no such things have been seen.

  Hollingworth

  OCTOBER 10TH

  TWELVE WEEKS AND FIVE DAYS OLD

  3:30 P.M.

  The Selver General psychiatric ward was a modern addition, an annexe to a much larger hospital within the city. Ten patients were housed in rooms built on one side of a wide corridor. Opposite the rooms were observati
on points, desks behind which members of staff could watch several patients at one time. Lauren’s room, like the other nine, had a large window taking up the entire top half of the front wall. This window was made of toughened safety glass, and she knew this for certain because, very early in her incarceration, she had pounded on it with her fists repeatedly as hard as she could, and it hadn’t even vibrated.

  At one end of this corridor was the secure entry system opening onto the rest of the hospital, and at the other was a small dining room which doubled as a visitors’ room. The tables were in rows, all of a piece with a bench on either side, and the whole lot screwed to the floor. Patrick and Lauren sat close together on a bench. There were four orderlies stationed around the room, paying close attention to the patients, but she only noticed because Patrick kept glancing anxiously at them. She was used to it now, and most of the time she almost didn’t see them.

  The room smelled strongly of bleach, and was too hot, as usual. Light through the high windows cast grids on the far walls, shadow cages for the shadow birds that perched there. Some of the other patients had visitors, but not many. Those that did were sitting opposite each other, talking quietly or playing card games. Unvisited souls sat alone, and those patients on Amber or Red lay placidly in bed, or paced behind the glass walls of their rooms, lost in a haze of medication.

  At the next table along, a filthy, skeletal old man sat alone playing a game of patience. Every few seconds he forced out a cough.

  “Do you mind sharing with males?” said Patrick, in a low voice.

  Lauren turned towards him. Her mouth hung open wetly; increased salivation was a side effect of the anti-psychotics she was taking. They also made her bloated, and dopey.

  “It’s fine,” said Lauren, trying not to drawl. “We have our own rooms. We only mix at mealtimes, and that’s only the people on Green.”

  The traffic light system was rather primitive, but it seemed to work. Follow the rules, take your pills, don’t throw anything at the glass or bite anyone, you could stay on Green for weeks. Only when on Green could you be considered for release. Lauren, like all patients, started out on Red. It had taken some adjustment of her meds before she was calm enough for Amber, and a lot of hard work and concentration to get on Green, but she’d done it. She’d been on Green now for five weeks. The doctors would shortly be meeting to discuss a visit home.