It’s one of the things that irritates me about my husband – I love a good argument every now and then, but he avoids conflict like a hostage negotiator. Not just with me; Dan is one of the most laid-back people I’ve ever met. When we first got together, it amazed me how much of a calming influence he was on me. It’s near impossible to argue with someone who refuses to argue back, but instead of testing how far I could push him like I’d have done in previous relationships, I found myself bending to his ways, my fire not so much extinguished as redirected. I took the passion that I had always had for a good fight – all the screaming, the name-calling and the sharpened words that couldn’t be put back in once they had been thrown – and I channelled it into my work. And truth be told, as much as he doesn’t understand my need to rescue Ellie Atkinson, he won’t condemn it or try to stop me. He won’t even say ‘I told you so’ if it all blows up in my face. Just like he didn’t last time.
This is nothing like last time, I tell myself. Nothing at all like last time. Ellie called me. She asked for my help. It would be negligent not to follow up on this phone call. Even as I repeat the words, I wonder if I’m trying to convince myself or practising to convince Edward should this trip ever come to light at work.
‘Left here.’ I point to the turn coming up, and within five minutes the road is lined with street lamps illuminating the sign for Acacia Avenue. ‘Left again.’
‘It’s not that bad down here.’ Dan sounds surprised, as though he expects Ellie and her foster family to be living in a stereotypical broken neighbourhood.
‘Ellie is a nice girl.’ I say it a little more firmly than I meant to, still smarting from Dan’s Carrie White remark. I haven’t told him about Hannah Gilbert’s visit to the house, or her wild claims about Ellie; when he asked about my panicked voicemail I told him I’d heard noises in the back garden that had turned out to be a cat. I wonder if he’d still be driving me to the Jeffersons’ house if I’d told him the truth. ‘It’s the last house, that one there.’
As we pull up at the end of the driveway, I glance upwards to the small room at the front that I know is Ellie’s. The Jeffersons have extended over their garage, so where I imagine the rest of the houses on the street are three-bedroom, this one has four. Ellie’s curtains are drawn and her light is off, but a small lamp shines through Mary’s curtains above the garage. My mouth feels as though I’ve gargled with rice, and I swallow to try and build up some saliva. Now that I’m here, I have absolutely no idea what I’m going to say. Sarah is probably still furious with me after our last encounter at the coffee shop. Will Ellie be in trouble if I walk up to the front door and say she called me? Will Sarah call my boss, accuse me of being unprofessional?
‘Are you okay?’ Dan asks, and despite his annoyance at me, he puts out a hand and squeezes my shoulder. ‘Your call. I can turn around and we can leave . . .’
‘No.’ I unclip my seat belt. ‘If anything has happened to Ellie, how could I . . .?’ I let my sentence hang there for a moment, then push open the car door. Whatever this might mean for my incredibly short career at Place2Be, Ellie chose to call me, to reach out to me. I can’t let her down.
The air outside the car is thick with moisture, and I hope to God that Ellie is inside the house, tucked up safely in bed, her earlier nightmare replaced by boys from her class or the bands that young girls have splashed across their bedroom walls.
The hallway beyond the front door is in darkness; no light shines from around the edges of the front-room curtains. Apart from the small spot of lamplight in Mary’s room, there are no signs of life anywhere. I pull out my phone and light up the screen: 10.25 p.m. Is everyone in bed? The girls should be, certainly, but maybe Sarah and Mark are too. It doesn’t matter. I’ve come this far and I can’t go home without checking Ellie is okay.
Taking a deep breath, I bang on the front door and wait. Nothing happens. What do I do now? When the house beyond stays swathed in darkness, I knock again, harder this time, more insistently. After a brief pause, a light at the top of the stairs flicks on and I hear from deeper within the house the thud of footsteps that get louder as their owner approaches.
The downstairs light comes on and a figure appears through the frosted glass.
‘Imogen.’ Sarah greets me with what I’m sure is fake joviality. How could anyone be pleased to see one of the mental health team at their front door after ten at night? Especially after the row we had the last time we spoke. I just pray that she really does have Ellie’s best interests at heart. ‘Is something wrong?’
I plaster on a smile and put on my best ‘I’m so sorry about this’ look.
‘No, at least I don’t think so, but I got a call from Ellie, about forty minutes ago. I think she was on her mobile and it sounded like she may have had a nightmare, but we got cut off. I’d have called the house, but my files are at work and I didn’t have your home number. I wasn’t entirely sure what to do, to be honest, after that day in the café, but I couldn’t have slept until I’d checked she was okay . . .’
Sarah looks embarrassed. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry. What a bloody inconvenience for you! Ellie is in Mary’s room, I’m sure I heard them chatting as I came to answer the door. They do that sometimes, sneak into one another’s rooms, and I haven’t put a stop to it because Mary doesn’t mind really and it’s good that Ellie has someone to chat to. They—’
‘Would you mind checking?’ I interrupt. ‘I hate to ask, but I’ll sleep much easier if I know I’ve done all I can.’
‘Of course,’ Sarah replies. ‘No problem. Do you want to come up and talk to her?’
‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘I’d prefer she didn’t know I’d been here. I don’t want her thinking I’ve betrayed her confidence.’
‘Right, yes, I see what you mean. I’ll just pop my head in and ask if she’s okay – although she might have seen your car or heard the door.’
She turns and takes the stairs two at time, I hear her knock quietly on Mary’s door and then low voices.
Glancing around the front hall, I clock two pairs of children’s trainers by the door, the bottoms of both covered in fresh wet mud. Ellie’s and Mary’s? Would the mud still be wet from earlier in the day, or is it from tonight?
Sarah appears again.
‘They’re both in Mary’s room. They seem fine. I said I thought I’d heard the door and wanted to see if they were both in bed. Ellie’s hair is wet, but when I questioned it she said she’d been in the shower. Mary mouthed that she’d wet the bed. Her bed has been changed.’
‘Does that happen often?’
Sarah shakes her head. ‘It’s not unheard of with some of the kids we’ve had, but it’s never happened to Ellie before. She was quiet and I didn’t want to push her. Without asking specifically if she’d called you . . .’
‘No,’ I say quickly. ‘Don’t do that. It’s fine, she probably just had a nightmare. She sounded a bit distant when she called; she might have just woken up.’
Sarah frowns and glances again up the stairs. ‘Have you given her your phone number?’
‘No,’ I admit. ‘I’m not sure how she got that. But it was the house phone and I guess it wouldn’t be hard to find. I haven’t mentioned where I live, but at the same time it’s not a huge secret and it’s a small town.’
Sarah nods. ‘Well, I apologise for the inconvenience of you having to come out here at this time of night.’
‘Really, it’s nothing,’ I assure her. Now that I know Ellie is safely inside, I just want to leave. I can practically hear Dan’s voice: Remember what happened last time you got too involved. And Pammy’s, more frank: Get the fuck out of there and look after your job, you idiot.
‘Thank you, all the same. It can’t be easy, getting involved with children like this.’ She gives a mirthless laugh. ‘I of all people know that. I appreciate you coming to check. And I wanted to apologise, about that day in the café. I was out of line.’
‘Don’t worry about it. Emotions running high and
all that. Well, I won’t take up any more of your time,’ I say, turning to the door. As I put my hand on the handle, Sarah speaks again.
‘You won’t have to tell anyone about this, will you?’ Her voice has a slight tremble to it.
‘No.’ I wonder if I’m going to regret this even as I say it. ‘As long as Ellie is safe and you keep an eye on her in light of the nightmares and possible bed-wetting situation, I don’t think anyone needs to know that she called me tonight, or that I came here. She was a bit confused, but she was at home and not in any danger.’ I open the door and Dan starts the car.
‘Thank you,’ Sarah says, and I nod, trying not to look at the mud-covered shoes on my way out.
52
Ellie
They hear the front door click closed and Sarah’s footsteps on the stairs again. Ellie lets out the breath she’s been holding.
‘Where were you all that time, Ellie?’ Mary’s voice is gentle as she rubs Ellie’s hair with the towel. She has helped Ellie change into a pair of her fleecy pyjamas and a dressing gown, and they are sitting on her bed. Ellie shakes her head.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know how long I was outside or how I got there. It’s like I sleepwalked or something. How did you know I was gone?’
‘I came to give you this,’ Mary indicates a mug of hot chocolate on her bedside table that has long gone cold, ‘but you weren’t there. I looked all around the house, then I got dressed and went into the back garden. You weren’t there either. I went inside again and the security light came on in the back porch. When I went back outside, you were just sitting under the tree. I was so scared.’
‘Why were you scared?’
‘I thought someone had hurt you. I thought you were . . .’ She lets the sentence trail off. ‘Then when I got to you, I saw that your eyes were open but you still didn’t look like you were here, in this world. You looked like you were somewhere else completely.’
‘I think I was,’ Ellie tells her, but she doesn’t even know what she means. She’s scared; scared of the screams that woke her, screams that she knows now were inside her own head. She’s scared of where she went and why she can’t remember leaving her bed, and she’s scared of what she might have done.
53
Imogen
The dirty grey sky is pregnant with rain; moisture hangs in the air, making the faces of the mourners damp with more than tears. Groups of people clad in black stand huddled together, the women jiggling and stepping from foot to foot to keep warm. There is fear in the air, making itself known in the faces of the bystanders, in the eyes of the congregation, in the way they keep their voices low when they talk. Everyone in the town knows how Hannah felt; everyone knows the accusations she made against Ellie. Do they think Ellie did this? Not necessarily, I suppose, but they don’t believe it was an accident either.
Evan Hawker, the maths teacher Hannah was having an affair with, came forward about their meetings in the flats the minute he found out about her death, but he furiously denies sending her a message about meeting that night. The police investigation is ongoing, but nothing has been found on her phone, or in the hollow in the tree in the school grounds where they apparently hid notes for each other, and yet according to Evan, Hannah wouldn’t have been at the flats for any other reason. Her death has ripped the community in two. People are shocked at the news of her affair, and Evan hasn’t been able to show his face at the funeral. The fact that she had a lover is bad enough, but for her death to have been so gruesome – two scandals in one event – is more than people can cope with. Florence Maxwell has asked me to take extra shifts at the school to make sure the children are coping with the loss of their teacher, and Edward has gladly released me from my other cases for the time being.
Most of the Year 11 kids that Hannah taught have been allowed to come to the funeral today, but the younger children have been kept away by concerned parents. Sullen teenagers line the kerb kicking stones and staring at their shoes; for once, none of them are telling jokes or discussing their sex lives. They look sad and respectful, and yet I wonder . . . who was really responsible for Hannah Gilbert’s death? Her lover? Her husband? One of her students? I know what some people will be saying: Hannah got on the wrong side of Ellie and now she has paid the ultimate price. All ridiculous, of course. Ellie was at home when Hannah was at the empty flats. No one saw her leave the house; there’s no reason to believe she wasn’t exactly where she said she was. I was there just a short while after Hannah was alleged to have been killed; too short a time for Ellie to have made it back from the block of flats. I just hope she won’t end up being used as a scapegoat for a small-town mentality of paranoia and fear.
I turn at the sound of tyres on gravel. The funeral car rolls slowly through the crematorium gates, and people gather to take their places in line. I wonder if half the people here even knew Hannah, if they liked her. Scanning the crowd, I see some familiar faces, including Florence Maxwell standing with a group of other teachers.
The car pulls to a halt outside the crematorium, followed by another, and then a third. Men in top hats and tails step out to open the doors for the people in the back. Hannah’s husband Sam and a young girl who must be her daughter get out of the second car. Sam has his hand on the small of the girl’s back as though steadying her, helping her to walk. He looks haunted by something more than grief. He sees Florence Maxwell and steers his daughter in her direction, the young girl collapsing into the head teacher’s arms.
From the third car emerges a frail old woman: a sight that should never be seen – a mother burying her daughter. I feel a pang of grief. However I felt about Hannah Gilbert in life, death changes everything. And Hannah’s was a particularly undeserving fate. A middle-aged woman – Hannah’s sister, perhaps – steers the frail old lady to the front of the line, assisted by Florence Maxwell. She and Hannah must have been close for the head teacher to take her place with the family like this. And indeed, the way that Florence embraced Hannah’s daughter suggests they knew each other very well.
What was it that made Hannah Gilbert hate Ellie so much? And all the talk about evil? For all her faults, Hannah really believed in what she was saying. I’m determined to find out why she felt that way. Not today, though, not now. Today we have someone to bury.
54
Imogen
‘I wanted to talk to you about what happened with your teacher,’ I say slowly, looking at Ellie to gauge her reaction. She doesn’t look up, keeping her eyes on the dirt beneath her feet. The two of us are walking along the canal path, the same canal that I fell into what feels like a lifetime ago. Now it’s daytime and the place doesn’t scare me in the light, although I’ve not risked walking home in the evening this way since my impromptu dip.
‘What about it?’ Ellie asks, still refusing to meet my eye. ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ I say kindly. ‘It’s a small town and people talk, especially in school. I wondered whether anyone had said anything to you?’
‘No one ever says anything to me,’ Ellie says, almost sulkily. ‘They hardly talk to me at school at all, unless it’s to call me names. That doesn’t mean I don’t hear things, though,’ she adds. ‘I hear more than people think.’
I feel a stab of foreboding. ‘What have you heard, then?’
Ellie looks up at me. ‘That Ms Gilbert and Mr Hawker were having an affair. They were having sex behind everyone’s back.’
It’s not the first time I’ve heard something like this from one of the children, although none of them has put it quite so candidly.
Ellie kicks at a stone in her path. ‘So if they were betraying people they were married to, maybe one of them killed her. To punish them.’
I stop walking and Ellie finally looks up at me. ‘What?’
‘No one killed Ms Gilbert, Ellie. What happened was a tragic accident.’
‘It wasn’t an accident. She was stabbed through the chest with a—’
‘That’s
enough.’ My voice comes out sharper than I intend. Where do these kids get their information? And how is it so startlingly bloody accurate? I know the details of Hannah Gilbert’s death through my work contacts; I told myself I wasn’t being nosy, but in order to help the children through what had happened, I needed to know the details so I wouldn’t be shocked at anything I heard. It obviously hasn’t worked, though – hearing such things from a mouth as young as Ellie’s is pretty shocking.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say gently, trying to dull the impact of my words. ‘It’s just not a very nice thing to talk about. The children at school don’t know the details, so they are embellishing to get a good story.’
‘You don’t honestly think what happened to Ms Gilbert was an accident?’
We are approaching the town now; I can see the tops of the buildings over the trees that line the canal. The path curves round into a huge park where the canal joins the river; in the summer I can remember it being so full of teenagers sunbathing and picnicking that it was hard to imagine where they all went in the winter months, hard to picture Gaunt and the surrounding villages having enough houses to store all these children away. Then once a year the fair would come to town and Pammy and I would sneak down to the park after dark – well, Pammy would sneak; my mum really couldn’t have cared less where I was any time of the day. Even now, after all these years, as we round the corner into the wide expanse of green I swear I can smell the burgers and doughnuts, the sweat mixed with suncream, and hear the music and the screams from the waltzers and twisters.
‘Sorry, what?’
‘Ms Gilbert,’ Ellie presses impatiently. ‘Do you honestly think it was an accident? That someone didn’t do it on purpose?’
The Foster Child Page 16