The Girls in the Garden

by Lisa Jewell

  “Please come and ask us questions. It will be so exciting.”

  Adele tutted. “Willow,” she said. “Grace is in hospital. In a coma. Show some respect.”

  “I am being respectful. I want to help the police find out who hurt her. What’s disrespectful about that?”

  “Just”—Adele sighed, threw the police an apologetic look—“maybe try not to be so excited about everything. It’s not a time for excitement.”

  “You know Grace had a boyfriend?” Willow asked, not showing much sign of being any less excited.

  The police officers stopped and turned back. “Really?” said WPC Cross. “What kind of boyfriend?”

  “Dylan,” said Willow, her eyes shining. “He’s our friend. We’ve known him, like, forever.”

  WPC Cross turned to Adele. “Is this the same Dylan you mentioned earlier?”

  “Yes. I suppose it is. Although, boyfriend and girlfriend at that age”—she laughed—“well, you know, it’s not exactly a relationship, it’s—”

  Willow cut her off. “It is,” she said, her back pressed into the door frame, climbing up the other side of the frame with her bare feet, until she was suspended halfway up, something she did all the time but that looked decidedly odd in the presence of a pair of police officers. “It is a proper relationship. They lurve each other.”

  Catkin and Fern were both tutting loudly now and looking appalled. Adele pulled Willow gently by the hand to detach her from the inside of the door frame and as she slid down her T-shirt rose up, revealing two large bruises in the small of her back.

  “Nasty bruises you’ve got there,” said WPC Cross.

  Adele looked at the bruises in horror. They were violent and fresh, the result of a fall off the swings in the dark on Saturday night. She’d landed backward on a child’s plastic toy and appeared on the terrace crying like a five-year-old. Adele had administered Tiger Balm and hugs and sent her back on her way a while later.

  “Fell off the swing.” Willow shrugged and skipped back to her schoolbook. “Didn’t hurt.”

  “You’re a brave girl then,” said WPC Cross, smiling, her eyes tracing an arc around the interior of the kitchen, over Adele’s bruised child, her choices, her lifestyle, before smiling again and saying good-bye.

  Adele closed the front door behind the two officers a moment later and leaned heavily against it. She was shaking slightly, feeling horribly incriminated in some deeply irrational way. She’d agreed to their talking to the children later, but only if Leo was present. After Willow’s unexpected outburst about Grace and Dylan being in love and the revelation of the awful bruises, which looked like those of a child who’d been kicked in the back with a hobnailed boot while lying in a fetal ball on the floor, she couldn’t face another interrogation without another grown-up in the room.

  Gordon appeared in the hallway then, his prosthetic foot in his hand, leaning heavily on his carved African stick. “What the hell did they want?”

  “They’re just trying to piece together what happened on Saturday night,” she said, trying to sound as though the whole episode had been perfectly pleasant. “Asking around the neighborhood. They’re coming back later to talk to the rest of you.”

  “Not much point talking to me,” he muttered, hopping toward the living room door. “Don’t know diddly.” He grimaced and called over his shoulder, “Give me a hand with this blessed contraption, will you, Mrs. H.? They keep telling me it’s easy and it’s not fucking easy. I’d like to see them try.”

  She followed him into the living room and hoisted his leg up onto the pouf.

  “What time are they coming back?” he said after a moment’s silence.

  “Sixish,” she said, rolling up his trouser leg, marveling at the neatness of what remained of his lower leg; where once there had been putrefaction and decay now there was a shiny pink and white knob of flesh and bone.

  “Don’t know why they’re bothering,” he said. “No one’s going to know anything. And anyone who does isn’t going to say anything. If there was foul play involved we’d know by now. Just one of those things,” he said, “like that Rednough girl. Stupid little girls get in over their heads. And look what happens. Just look what happens.”

  He shook his head heavily from side to side and Adele resisted the temptation to whack him over his big fat crown with his prosthetic foot and storm out. Even now, she thought, with a young girl in a hospital bed, wired up to machinery, her mother in the next room, probably unable to eat or form a thought beyond her daughter’s welfare, even now this horrible old man could find not a shred of normal human decency within him, not an iota of empathy.

  She fitted his prosthetic in icy-cold silence and then returned to her daughters in their kitchen classroom, feeling as though every aspect of her perfect life had been taken out of its box, bent out of shape, and left in a warped, unappealing heap on the floor.

  23

  The WPC turned up at the hospital again early on Monday morning. She’d introduced herself the day before but Clare couldn’t recall her name.

  “So, Grace. How old is she?”

  “Well, she’s thirteen. It was her birthday. On Saturday. So, only just.”

  “And what sort of girl would you say she was? Generally?”

  “Well, you know. A bit moody. A bit stroppy. Prone to unpredictable outbursts of affection.”

  The WPC looked at her with arctic-blue eyes. “Mature for her age?”

  “Physically, well, yes, I guess so. She’s tall. Big-boned. Developed. In, you know, some ways.”

  “Mm-hm. Okay.” She wrote this down. Clare couldn’t think why. “Lots of friends?”

  “A few. Yes. She just started a new school in January, and she hasn’t really found her feet socially there yet. But out in the park, yes, she’s definitely part of the scene out there. She spends a lot of time with a family over the way. They have three daughters, similar ages.”

  “Ah, yes.” The WPC flipped some pages in her notepad. “The Howeses?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Leo and Adele.” Clare blanched at the memory of the way she’d behaved on Saturday night.

  “I’ve just come from theirs. They said you were there on Saturday night. From”—she ran her finger along the lines of her handwriting—“five till about nine?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And you had your younger daughter with you?”

  “Yes. For most of the time.”

  “And Grace was hanging about with the other teenagers?”

  “Yes.” Clare only knew that because Pip had told her. She had barely given Grace a thought from approximately her third glass of wine.

  “So when would you say was the last time you saw Grace before she was found?”

  The answer to this question sat painfully on the tip of Clare’s tongue. “Well, I saw her for a little while during the barbecue. At the Howeses’. She was there for a few minutes. Not very long. But before that, the last time I saw her properly was around two p.m.” Her eyes fell to the floor.

  “Two p.m.?”

  “Yes. I threw her a little birthday party—well, not even a party really, just a gathering. On our patio. We had nonalcoholic cocktails, presents, cake.”

  “Okay. And who was there?”

  “Me and the girls, obviously. The three sisters. Another girl from the park called Tyler. A boy called Dylan.”

  The WPC stabbed her notepad triumphantly. “Maxwell-­Reid!”

  “Who . . . ? What . . . ?”

  “Dylan Maxwell-Reid?”

  “Is he?” said Clare, confused. “I don’t know. Anyway, he was there. And my mother came too.”

  “No one else?”

  “No.”

  “Grace’s father?”

  “No,” Clare replied circumspectly. “We’re estranged.”

  “Okay. So what happened at two p.m.? Party ended?”

  “Yes. The party ended. The older ones disappeared. Pip and I tidied up. Then Pip went out into the par
k—she was taking part in some pet competition thing. My mother left a few minutes later and I sat on my patio for a while, reading. Then Pip came back, said she wanted me to come and look at some animals with her, some kind of petting zoo. I don’t know. We looked for Grace then. Couldn’t find her anywhere. So I called her . . .”

  “When was this?”

  “I don’t know. Fourish, I guess. She was at Tyler’s house.”

  She checked her notes again. “Tyler Rednough?”

  “I don’t know what her surname is.”

  “And where does she live, this Tyler?”

  “Just over the way from us, the apartment block on the right.”

  “And does Grace spend a lot of time at Tyler’s house?”

  Clare shook her head. “No, no—I think this was the first time she’d been there. As far as I know. Her flat doesn’t open onto the park. So you have to leave the park, walk on the road to get in and out. And I thought she knew she wasn’t supposed to do that.”

  “But clearly she didn’t.”

  “No.” Clare cast her eyes down. “No. I told her I wasn’t happy about it. But, you know, it was her birthday. I didn’t make her come back. Didn’t want to cramp her style.”

  “No.” The WPC looked at her sympathetically. “Of course not. And do you have any idea what she was doing between then and seven o’clock when she came to the Howeses’ for the barbecue?”

  “She was at the face-painting stall, as far as I know. And then I sent Pip to check on her at about six o’clock and Pip said she was up on the hill, their usual spot, with all the others.”

  “So,” said the WPC in a let’s-get-this-straight tone. “Two p.m., she left your house. Four p.m. she was at Tyler’s flat. Six p.m. she was on top of the hill with her friends. Seven p.m. she was at the Howeses’ having her dinner. So really we’re looking at a big black hole between seven thirty and ten o’clock when your younger daughter found her. Can you tell me where you were between those times?”

  “Well, I was at the Howeses’ until about nine o’clock. Then Pip and I walked home and I went to bed.”

  “At nine p.m.?”

  “I was feeling a bit unwell.” Clare felt her mouth grow dry. She reached for a plastic cup of water on the table in front of her and spilled some down the front of her top. She wiped it away with the back of her hand. “I was sick.” No point lying. The police would be talking to everyone, she assumed. Someone was bound to mention the fact that she’d been paralytic, that her twelve-year-old had had to virtually carry her home.

  “Ah, yes. Mrs. Howes mentioned you were a bit the worse for wear. And your younger daughter? What was she doing while you were asleep?”

  Clare gave up the façade. She didn’t have the energy for it anymore. She let her head drop into her hands; then she lifted it again and looked at the WPC openly and frankly. “I have no idea,” she said, with a wry smile. “I was out cold.”

  “But she was with you?”

  “Yes. I assume. She says she sat with me for a while and then she went to get her phone to try to call Grace, to get her to come in. But apparently Grace’s phone was out of charge. Oh, and she said Leo Howes came to check on us both, shortly after we got back. And then at some point she left me and went out to look for Grace.” She shrugged, as if to say: Take me to the stocks, take me to the ducking pond. I am the worst mother in the world.

  “Well, me and my colleague are going back to the Howeses’ later to talk to their daughters. They were out with Grace for most of the evening so they might be able to shed some light on that vital couple of hours. And we’ll talk to Mr. Howes. But just generally, Ms. Wild. Grace—did she have any problems in the park? Anyone who might have wished her harm? Any complicated relationships with her friends? That kind of thing?”

  “God. No. I mean . . . No. They’re just children. They’re just—”

  “Children,” she cut in. “Yes, that’s true. But children are hard to define sometimes, aren’t they?” She gazed at Clare coolly. “My niece goes from playing Barbie dolls with her little sister to screaming at her mum ’cause she won’t let her wear a push-up bra.” She blinked and paused, as though she thought Clare was about to laugh and say: Oh yes, so true, how naïve of me!

  “Well. Of course. It’s a difficult age. Neither one thing nor another. But no, they’re all just friends.”

  “Ah, now, that’s interesting.” The WPC flipped through her notepad again. “Because one of the Howes girls—the little one . . . ?”

  “Willow.”

  “Willow. Yes. She told me—and obviously she is very young and who knows how much truth you can get out of a child that age—but she told me that Grace and Dylan Maxwell-Reid were going out together.”

  Clare sighed. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. I mean, yes, I’ve seen them hanging out together. It does look like they’re quite close. But they’re thirteen! It’s not like they’re going for candle­lit dinners together, you know. It’s just, you know, innocent, childish—”

  “Willow tells me that they’re in love. That it’s serious.”

  Clare laughed, a loud bark of a laugh that didn’t quite sound like it had come from her.

  The WPC laughed too. Put a lid back on her pen. “Kids,” she said.

  “Have you got children?” asked Clare.

  “What. Me? God, no. Not yet. Plenty of time for that.”

  Clare nodded. The WPC looked about thirty. Barely younger than her.

  “So, we’re still waiting on the full medical report on Grace. And I hear there’s a forensic nurse on her way over right now. So, depending on all the test results, and, well, I’ll keep asking around, fill in the blanks, we should have a much clearer idea of what happened. You know. The big picture.” She put her notepad into her little leather bag, hooked it over her shoulder, smiled. “What do you think happened, Ms. Wild?” She asked this in a friendly, talking-off-the-record tone.

  Clare smiled weakly, unable to find the energy even to lift her head. “I don’t know. I should know. But I don’t. I’m so sorry.”

  The WPC looked down at Clare and smiled sympathetically.

  “We’ll get there. Don’t you worry. A thirteen-year-old in a big park full of people in central London? We’ll get there.”

  After she left the room, Clare put her face inside her hands and cried.

  24

  Her mum was crying when Pip returned to the waiting room. She was trying to act like she wasn’t. She was trying to force a smile but it was really tragic. “Pip,” she said, reaching for her hands. “Listen. This is really, really important. Really important. The police have just been and they will probably want to talk to you at some point too. So we really need to talk about what happened out there on Saturday night. We really need to work out the details. Because Mr. Darko told me yesterday that the coma isn’t actually a head trauma. That the injuries to her face are superficial. That apparently . . .” She paused, smiling shakily. “Someone gave her an overdose of drugs.”

  Pip straightened. Felt her blood fill with adrenaline. She still hadn’t told anyone about Grace’s top being up, about her shorts being down. She’d covered her sister up before anyone had come up the hill. She’d been too embarrassed to say anything. And then scared that she might get into trouble if she did.

  “So what’s happening,” her mum continued, massaging Pip’s hands with hers, “is that the police are sending a special nurse, quite soon, and she is going to examine Grace for any signs of anything bad having happened to her. And then we’ll have a better idea about things. But in the meantime, baby, I need you to really, really try and remember anything, everything from Saturday night. Hm?” She smiled a watery smile at Pip and squeezed her hands.

  Pip nodded and forced the words through the block inside her throat. “When I found her,” she whispered, “her top was up.”

  Her mum stopped massaging her hands and looked at her sharply. “Up?”

  “Yes. Like, you know . . .” She pulled at the hem o
f her own top and raised it slightly. “But higher.”

  “Could you see her bra?”

  She nodded. Gulped. “It was up, too.”

  “Could you see her breasts?” her mother asked breathlessly.

  “Yes. Her bra was kind of . . . It was like”—she put her hands behind her back to demonstrate—“twisted. You know. Like it hadn’t been undone. Just sort of pulled. And her shorts, too. They were, like, down.”

  Her mother made a pained noise under her breath.

  “Not all the way down,” she continued. “Just, you know, to here.” She pointed to a spot on her upper thigh.

  “Underwear?”

  Pip nodded. Cast her eyes down.

  “Pip,” said her mother, “baby. Why didn’t you say so? Before?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I tidied her all up when I found her. I didn’t want other people coming and seeing her like that. I thought she’d be really cross. And then when everyone came and then the police came and nobody asked, and then when we found out she was in a coma . . .” She shrugged. “I thought maybe it didn’t matter. I thought maybe it wasn’t important.” She paused. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I am really sorry.”

  “No,” said her mother, opening up her arms. “No. Please, baby. Don’t be sorry. You didn’t know. How could you know? It was my job to know and I failed.”

  Pip let her mum hug her, holding her breath against the sour smell of her. Then Clare released her and held her at arms’ length. “Was there anything else, though? Anything I missed? You need to tell me, Pip. Tell me every last thing.”

  Pip thought back through the day. Then she thought back through the preceding days and weeks. She thought of all the moments over the past six months when things hadn’t felt quite right and she looked at her mother and didn’t know where to start. Then one memory came to the fore. The wild-eyed boy on the hill; the way he’d looked at her.

  “Someone needs to talk to Max,” she said.

  “Max?”

  “Yes. You know, the boy with red hair. The one who’s always playing football. He was there.”