by Bud Craig
There was a desperate need to know what happened to the real Charlotte Stephens. Where is she? That was the question, I thought with more than a trace of sadness. Best not to ask it yet.
“What happens now?” asked Charlotte.
“We need to…” Sarita began, “we need to make some more inquiries. In the meantime, what do you want to do?”
She leant her head back and took a deep breath.
“I need to have a private word with Gus,” she said.
“Fine, I’ll wait outside, shall I?”
“If you don’t mind,” said Charlotte, rediscovering her manners.
Sarita got up.
“If you could just put everything on hold until I speak to Gus,” said Charlotte.
“Sure.”
We watched while Sarita went out of the office. As I turned back towards Charlotte, the penny dropped. Being sick in the morning, saying how happy she was, smiling her way through the tricky interview with Charlotte. Sarita was pregnant.
“Gus, quick, come with me,” hissed Charlotte as soon as Sarita had gone.
She got up and took me by the hand.
“Where are we going?” I asked as she pulled me out of the office towards the exit.
“To Little Hulton. I’ll drive, I’ve borrowed mum’s car.”
“Why Little Hulton?”
“It’s where Tracy Stephens lives. My so-called mother,” said Charlotte, taking me outside into the rain.
“Bloody hell.”
Charlotte let go of my hand and ran towards the car park.
“She spends most of the time getting pissed at home,” she said, turning back to me while on the move. “With luck she’ll be there now.”
“Charlotte, stop,” I gasped, struggling to keep up.
“We need to pick up some booze on the way. Boddington’s. She’ll tell us to get stuffed if we arrive empty handed.”
“Charlotte, we maybe need to think about this,” I said as I followed her, desperately trying to keep up. “I’m not sure this is a good idea.”
“I’ll go on my own then,” she snapped back.
“An offer I can’t refuse,” I said, recognising emotional blackmail when I heard it.
“We must speak to her before the police pick her up. I need to know what happened.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I just can’t get my head round this,” said Charlotte, hurling the car towards the M602 and screeching down the slip road.
The sky had clouded over and a steady drizzle was falling. The wipers squeaked across the windscreen. My suede jacket wouldn’t offer much protection, I thought, as I looked out. Worrying about the weather, though, was just a distraction from more serious concerns.
“You and me both,” I said, pinning myself back in the passenger seat.
“I mean, what the hell happened?” she went on.
“I don’t know, but when we get there. If we get there,” I corrected myself as she overtook a Land Rover on the inside, “let me do the talking.”
I watched the motorway signs whiz by, gritted my teeth and decided to close my eyes. When I opened them again, I was surprised to see we were passing through the terraced houses on Manchester Road in Walkden. Nearly there. Charlotte stopped outside an off licence where we stocked up for Tracy’s benefit.
A few minutes later we reached Little Hulton and turned left down Kenyon Way. I noticed a one storey building called the Top Club where the Labour Club used to be in my teenage years. I dreaded to think how many traffic offences Charlotte had committed to get us this far so quickly.
“Hello, Tracy, it’s only me,” said Charlotte as we crept down the hall of the council flat minutes later.
Carrying a 24 pack of Boddingtons, I followed Charlotte to the living room through a door on the right. We saw a rotund woman with straggly grey hair on a sagging sofa. On the television a game show I’d never seen before failed to hold Tracy’s attention.
“So you could be arsed to come and see your mother for once,” slurred Tracy, swigging from a can. “Who’s this twat?”
She nodded towards me before taking another drink. She shook the can and, discovering it was empty, chucked it on a table in the corner.
“This is Gus,” said Charlotte.
“Bit old for you, isn’t he?”
“Nothing like that. Gus is…”
“Hiya, Tracy,” I put in, “I’ve brought you a drink.”
I put the beer on the table next to a whiffy carton of milk and took two cans out. I sat down on an armchair facing Tracy.
“Ta,” she said as she took the can I offered.
The cans hissed open. We drank.
“I used to do my first underage drinking round here.”
“Did you,” she asked.
“Yeah, my mate used to live in Carrfield Avenue.”
“Carrfield, eh? Just round the corner.”
“We used to get in the Kenyon Arms.”
“Old people’s home now,” said Tracy, taking another long drink.
“Never.”
“Aye, Poor Dick’s is an Indian Restaurant.”
“Bloody hell,” said Gus, “the Antelope a curry house. What about the Lancastrian?”
“Pulled down. Just a hole in the ground now.”
“No wonder you have to drink at home.”
“He’s all right, your boyfriend,” she said, turning to Charlotte, who had sat down on a rickety hardback chair.
“I’m not her boyfriend, Tracy,” I explained. “I’m Gus Keane a social worker. We have met. Charlotte’s asked me to come with her today.”
“What’s she done that for, the little bitch? Bringing a social worker to see me. Nothing but trouble, they are.”
“To start with she wanted to trace her father. Now she wants to know what happened to the real Charlotte.”
“The real Charlotte, what you on about?”
She spoke in a bored Bolton accent through the gaps between her blackened teeth. A room-filling body odour came off her in waves as she spread herself over the settee.
“Because this ‘Charlotte’ here, the Charlotte I know, isn’t the child you gave birth to.”
She wriggled around and scraped her feet along the floor.
“She’s not your child – we’ve had a DNA test done.”
“Who is she then, the cat’s mother?”
“She’s Kylie Anderson as you well know. It was her who was removed from your care by Social Services.”
I stared into Tracy’s eyes. We were coming to the crunch. I wouldn’t like what I was about to hear. That’s what Mick Askey had said but I had no idea at the time what he meant.
“The question is, Tracy, what happened to the real Charlotte?”
“I have a right to know,” said Charlotte.
“I’m saying nowt,” she said, looking to her left.
“In that case, we’ll be off,” I said, getting up and picking up the case of beer. “We’ll take these back with us.”
“You can’t do that,” she whined, “I’ve run out and I don’t get paid while tomorrow.”
“Well, talk then,” I said, putting the beer back on the table and sitting down again.
Tracy paused to wipe saliva from her chin with the back of her hand.
“It were Mick.”
“Who’s Mick,” I asked.
“He were my bloke, weren’t he? You know, living with me. At time, like.”
“What’s his second name?”
“Askey. Mick Askey.”
Now the two of us looked one another full in the face. My stomach tightened and I held my breath.
“Tell me about Mick.”
Tracy leant forward and placed her elbows on the table. She rested her chin on her hands like a bored teenager.
“I’m not kidding you. He were gorgeous in them days,” she said.
I nodded as she began to cry.
“Oh, God.”
She wiped tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand.
>
“I were gorgeous too. You should have seen me. You would have fancied me, I can guarantee.”
She sniffed and wiped her cheeks again.
“I could have had any lad I wanted and I had to pick Mick Askey.”
“What was he like?”
“Could be nice except when he were drunk. Or if you crossed him.”
“I can imagine.”
She sat back again.
“When I first met him I thought he were great. Real tough guy, dead muscly, you know what I mean? He picked me up in the White Lion. I were pissed out of my head.”
I tapped my foot on the carpet.
“What was he like with Charlotte?”
Tears fell down her face again and for a few seconds she couldn’t speak.
“Listen, right,” she said. “It weren’t my fault, I couldn’t help it. You can’t know what it’s like unless you’ve been there.”
“What was he like with Charlotte,” I repeated.
“Most of the time he just ignored her. Said that were my job, always on at me to keep her quiet. He were worse when he’d been on the piss.”
“What was he like then?”
“He said she did his head in. He couldn’t stand her crying.”
“That’s what babies do,” I said.
Tracy stopped talking to slurp more beer before resuming.
“I know. I looked after Charlotte all right, health visitor and everyone said she were doing fine.”
I nodded.
“I used to try and keep him out of her way,” she went on. “I did, honest. Best thing with his temper and that.”
Charlotte got up, scraping her chair across the floor.
“I can’t handle this, Gus,” she said, “I’ll wait in the car.”
She hurried out, wiping tears from her face with her arms. I looked anxiously after her but knew she would want me to finish this.
“Let me know what she says.”
“Go on, Tracy,” he said. “You tried to keep him away from Charlotte.”
“But I couldn’t keep him away all the time.”
Again the tears came. This time I thought the sobbing would go on forever.
“What happened?”
“I don’t rightly know,” she said, calmer now.
I knew this could not be true.
“What happened? I’m not leaving here until you tell me.”
“One night she woke us up. He’d had a few so he had a right mood on him.”
She drained her can and let it fall on the settee. I opened another one and gave it to her.
“He jumped out of bed and went to her room. Shouting his head off, you know, ‘Shut up, you fucking little bastard.’”
A tension shot through the room. She looked round as if searching for an escape.
“Couple of minutes later he came back. Said there’d been a bit of an accident.”
“What did you do?”
She rearranged her hair without making any appreciable difference.
“I got up and went and had a look at her. She were lying in her cot all quiet. He said he thought she were dead.”
I nodded.
“I goes, ‘don’t be daft, she can’t be dead’…”
She looked pleadingly at me.
“But she was,” I said.
She averted her eyes.
“God help me, she were fucking dead. I just picked her up and held her. It just ...fucking destroyed me.”
She sobbed quietly to herself as though she had no energy to do anything else. The mystery’s only half-solved, I said to myself.
“I said get her to hospital but he wouldn’t have it.”
“Why not?”
“He said they’d fit him up for killing her,” she said. “He’d go down for life. He said to bury her in the back garden.”
“And you went along with him?”
“God forgive me, I did.”
She sat still, breathing shallowly. She buried her head in her hands before looking at me.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she begged, folding her arms across her chest, “you don’t know what he’s like, he would have fucking killed me.”
I pursed my lips.
“Go on, Tracy,” I said with a sigh.
“Mick had one of them vans you can sleep in.”
“A camper van?”
“Yeah, that’s the one, yellow it were. You can make a cup of tea and everything.”
“And?”
“Day after we’d buried her he said, ‘let’s go to Blackpool. For the illuminations. Take our minds off things’.”
“Take your minds off…”
With an effort I choked back my anger as Tracy went on.
“On the way I kept saying ‘what if they catch up with us and we haven’t got a kid with us? They’ll start asking questions.’”
I’m ahead of you, I said to myself.
“He got fed up of me nagging and said ‘just grab another kid’ then’. Anyway, we came off motorway at Chorley. We went in this pub. He wanted a couple of pints.”
He would, I said to myself.
“Anyway we stopped outside a shop on the way back. I nipped in and got some cheap fags and a couple of pasties.”
I wanted to tell her to get on with it, get it over with but knew she had to tell it in her own way.
“On my way out I saw a pushchair outside the shop with a kid in it. I didn’t think about it, just grabbed it and walked away.”
I held my breath again. How a moment can change lives forever.
“When I got to the van he were ready and waiting, revving the engine up. He slid the door open and I got in. Shoved push chair onto the seat next to me.”
She took a deep breath and another drink. She shook her head as though trying to wish away the past.
“She looked a bit like Charlotte, same colour hair and that. Good as gold she were, never woke up all night. We drove straight back home, never bothered going to Blackpool.”
With some relief I realised it was nearly over.
“Mick buggered off the next day. Told me to say nowt.”
“Didn’t anybody recognize Kylie? Her picture had been all over the papers and television for twenty-four hours.”
Tracy shrugged.
“We never bothered much with neighbours. Our Health Visitor had left and we didn’t see the new one for a few weeks.”
“I see.”
“Any road, as far as anybody else were concerned, I already had a kid. Why should I snatch someone else’s?”
We looked at one another while she tried to stop her tears.
“I couldn’t cope with a kid after that. I had nightmares and that. Started drinking to forget about it. You never forget though. I were glad when they took her away. I knew she’d be better off.”
She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her jumper. I told her I’d have to report what she’d told me. She barely reacted. On my way out I phoned Sarita Ellerton and told her what Tracy had said. Now I just had to tell Charlotte.
* * *
Charlotte sat hunched up on the passenger seat, twisting her hands together and biting her bottom lip, as I went through what had happened to the real Charlotte Stephens. Tears streaked her face. For ten minutes we sat in silence.
“You know, all my life people have been offering me therapy,” she said, finally breaking the silence, “but I’ve always resisted. Now I’m not so sure.”
“I’ve had counselling, you know.”
“You?”
“Yeah. It was brilliant, helped me a lot.”
“Do you think I could see the person you did?”
“I’ll have a word with her,” I said.
“Thanks.”
* * *
“The headlines tonight,” intoned George Alagiah the next evening.
Drinking red wine, I sat in my living room, watching the BBC news with more interest than usual.
“Sensational developments in the search for Kylie Anderson,” the
newsreader went on over a shot of a press conference, “as her mother speaks to the world.”
After more headlines and a warning about flash photography, the programme moved back to the press conference where Elaine Anderson, formally dressed in the style of an upmarket PA, sat with the Chief Constable on her left.
“I have wonderful news,” said Elaine, the controlled emotion in her voice judged to a nicety. “More than I could ever hope for.”
The flash bulbs went off as promised and there was a murmur of expectancy.
“Kylie is alive and well.”
The murmur took on the character of unruly group of third formers left in the hands of an inexperienced supply teacher. Elaine continued as the hubbub died down.
“For legal reasons, I am unable to explain in detail how Kylie was found or where she is now. This has been a shock for both of us – a nice shock but nonetheless a shock. Kylie does not feel able to go public at this time.”
That’s one way of putting it, I thought, as Elaine drank from a glass of water and composed herself.
“While I am obviously delighted that my beloved little girl is alive, there are certain aspects of… what has happened that cause me great sadness. The reason for this will be made clear once further investigations are completed.”
The conference moved to its end with no clear conclusion. I was about to switch off when the next item came on the screen. A council house in Little Hulton, taped off like a crime scene, appeared on the screen. It was, I reckoned, a few streets down from where Tracy now lived. A reporter stood near Our Lady and the Lancashire Martyrs church. He spoke of police digging in the garden:
“It is believed the current residents have no connection with this investigation. Our understanding is that the purpose of the digging dates back to the nineteen nineties.”
There followed several minutes of pointless speculation and obvious remarks about the shock in the close knit community. This was padded out with interviews with neighbours keen to get on telly. I reached for the remote control and switched off, wondering what the police had found.
“Hiya, Charlotte,” I said the next morning.
Trying to smile, she came into the interview room at Ordsall Tower and sat down opposite me. She put a plastic water bottle on the table between us.
“You are still Charlotte, aren’t you?”