by Lauren North
It’s over.
She never has to come back here again.
Except it’s not over, Harrie realizes. She still has Dean’s phone. She’s still in a heap of trouble. Her mum and Elise and Molly are still in danger.
What does she do now? She can’t go to the police and she can’t tell Elise or her mum.
You tell anyone about this and I promise you I will know, and then I’ll kill your mum and your sisters, and I’ll make you watch and then I’ll kill you.
An idea starts to form in Harrie’s thoughts. She could speak to Kat. She could give Kat Dean’s phone, and then Kat will sort it all out. Harrie will go to Kat’s tomorrow. It will be easy to slip away during trick-or-treating.
Harrie runs across the field as fast as her legs will carry her, wishing it was Dean’s voice chasing her away and not his silence.
CHAPTER 50
Saturday, Halloween
Anna
I’m jittery. Distracted. Going through the motions of normal life. Clubs and lunch and playing with Molly. Checking on the twins. Washing and cleaning like everything is fine, and I keep catching myself doing it and thinking what the hell? I can’t carry on as normal any more. Too much is happening. Rob, Dean, Harrie. A village group up to something. Bloody trousers. My head spins with it all – an out-of-control carousel.
And yet it’s Halloween and Molly is bouncing with excitement and I have to focus. She’s been staring out of the window every ten minutes and declaring it almost dark since three p.m., and now it really is almost time to go and I’m on my tiptoes, digging through the top shelf of the wardrobe in the twins’ room, searching for the black silk gloves to go with Molly’s witch’s costume, which I know are in here but can’t for the life of me find. I stretch a little further, arm muscles crying out in pain, and the edge of my hand brushes against something hard. I tease it towards me with the tips of my fingers until the weight of it is clasped in my hand and I know before I see it that it’s a phone.
I pull it from the shelf and then it’s lying in the palm of my hand. An iPhone.
This isn’t Harrie’s or Elise’s. Neither of them has a phone and there’s no way they could have bought one without me knowing. Even second-hand it would cost hundreds of pounds and neither of them has that kind of money.
I press a button and the screen lights up. It’s locked, password-protected, but I can see an ominous red empty-battery symbol in the top right corner and a list of missed calls and text messages. There are dozens. Some are withheld but others I recognize. Anthony Campbell is one. Sue is another. And one name that stands out above all the rest. My own.
Anna James: 3 missed calls.
My pulse is racing as I look past the call list to the photo in the background, the sky-blue Stockton’s logo I know so well from working on the website.
I rush downstairs, phone in hand, and find my own sitting on the side. Dean’s name is in my recent contacts and I know before I press it that when I do, my name will appear on the other phone’s screen.
I connect the dots from what I know to what I don’t. Dean was last seen in the village ten days ago. The same evening that I got stuck on the road and left Harrie alone for hours. The same evening Dean’s brother was speeding towards the village and died in a car crash.
There was mud on the floor in the kitchen that night. The back door was unlocked. There was blood on Harrie’s clothes. She said Dean’s name in her sleep and she has his phone. I don’t know what happened yet or what connects them, but I’m going to find out.
‘Did you find the gloves, Mummy?’ Molly says from beside me, her little voice making me jump. I slip Dean’s phone into my pocket and turn to face her.
‘No, I didn’t, but you can wear my woolly ones if you promise not to drop them?’
‘I promise,’ she grins, oblivious to the shake in my voice. ‘Can we get dressed now?’
Outside the last of the light is slipping from the day.
‘Good idea. Elise, Harrie,’ I call out. ‘Time to get dressed in your costumes.’
‘I want to be Cruella De Vil from 101 Dalmatians,’ Molly announces.
I’m too distracted by the weight of the phone in my pocket, the weight of questions lying heavy on my mind, to listen. Elise and Harrie appear from the living room and run upstairs without a word. I want to call Harrie back and ask her about the phone, but what is the point? It will just end with another tearful argument and we’re already running late. I promised Molly she could trick-or-treat with Olivia and the rest of her class. The phone, the questions – it will have to wait an hour until we’re back and Molly is watching TV with a bucket of chocolate and sweets.
‘Mummy? I said I want to be Cruella De Vil.’
‘But you said you wanted to be a witch,’ I reply, my gaze moving to the kitchen table, now strewn with Halloween paraphernalia. Face paints and cotton pads, vampire teeth and devil’s horns. No Cruella De Vil outfit, nothing I can cobble together to look even remotely like the evil character with one half of her hair white and the other black.
‘But I don’t want to be a witch,’ Molly says, her face a deep frown.
‘Sweetheart,’ I start, injecting as much calm, as much understanding, into my voice as I can. ‘Last month when I asked you, you said you wanted to be a witch and so I’ve made you a witch’s costume.’ I don’t mention staying up until midnight cutting up an old black cocktail dress and sewing it into a cape because last year’s one came from Poundland and ripped after two minutes. ‘I’ve even put spooky green thread on your hat so it looks like you have green hair.’
The frown remains but she doesn’t argue as she reaches out to caress the hat. ‘Will you paint my face green too, so I look really spooky like that witch in that show that Olivia went to see?’
I stare down at the face paints on the table. The green is almost empty from Elise’s Frankenstein face last year. I can see the bottom of the pot and the edges are dried and cracked. Surely some water will revive it. There might be just enough to cover Molly’s face. ‘Absolutely.’ I paste on a smile as the twins appear in the kitchen.
Harrie is wearing last year’s werewolf costume. It’s too small around the legs and I can see skinny ankles sticking out the bottom of the brown baggy trousers. It has gloves with matted grey fur and a full head mask.
Elise stands beside her, wearing her favourite pink PJs. The ones with the black stars and the swirly writing. Dream Big.
‘Where’s your costume?’ I ask Elise. ‘You’re not going out in PJs, are you?’
‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.
‘Why not? Are you feeling all right?’
Molly dances at my feet and I grab the face paint and dab it with a damp ball of cotton wool. It remains like a rock. Only when I slop some water into the dish and rub it against the paint does the cotton wool turn a hopeful green.
‘Not really,’ Elise replies. ‘Can I stay here?’
I hesitate, feeling torn in two, right down the middle. I don’t want to drag Elise out in the cold if she’s unwell. But Molly’s lip is already wobbling and I can’t let her down. I’ve been so focused on Harrie this last week I’ve neglected Molly. She’s always been my go-with-the-flow baby – not that she’s ever had much choice in the matter, being born the younger sister to twins. But Molly is just as aware as her sisters that she hasn’t spoken to her daddy this week and the brief moment he called on Thursday has done nothing to settle any of our worries.
I’ll go to the police on Monday, I decide suddenly. I should’ve done it earlier. What I’ll say dances tauntingly in my head and I wonder if Rob will be nothing more than a case number like Dean. My husband has been lying to me for years about where he’s been and about a mortgage debt I knew nothing about, and now he’s not come back at all. Hardly a priority case.
I’ll have to tell the children something soon. The weight of my own secret lies like a stone in my belly. I’ll have to tell them a lot of things soon.
‘Are we sti
ll going?’ Molly’s voice is soft and whiny.
‘Of course,’ I smile. ‘Now stay still and let me pop this face paint on.’ I run the cotton-wool ball over Molly’s skin until her whole face is a pale green. It’s a washed-out version of a witch but Molly grins when she looks in the mirror and that’s enough for me.
I grab the house phone from its holder and June answers on the second ring.
‘Say no more,’ June says when I explain about Elise. ‘I’ll be around in five.’ Her voice is so full of joy, it’s as though I’ve just invited her on an all-inclusive holiday to the Caribbean. June has been a rock to me this past week. I think about what she said about my closeness to Dean. If you’d developed a friendship with a woman … would you have questioned whether we were having an affair? Now I wish it had been June I’d been close to.
She hangs up and I turn back to Elise who is pulling an ‘I don’t need a babysitter’ face, but she says nothing. The battle is already won and I smile gratefully and kiss the top of her head.
‘We’ll only be an hour. We’re just going to do the estate.’
‘And Olivia’s house,’ Molly says. ‘We have to do Olivia’s house.’
‘Of course.’ I cringe inwardly. Tracy is the last person I want to see. I wonder briefly if it’s too late to hide behind a costume.
‘Mum, it’s five. Can I go? I can see Sandra on the corner with the others,’ Harrie says, her voice muffled by the mask.
‘I thought you were meeting at five thirty? I was going to walk with you.’ I glance around for my phone to check the messages but it’s hiding somewhere in the mess. I’m trying not to think about the secret group, their gossip about Harrie and Elise. Kat and Tracy have texted a few times, but I’ve ignored them. They’ve simultaneously managed to apologize and tell me it’s no big deal and not what I think. Silly Anna worrying again. I can’t ignore them forever, but it’s something else that can wait until Monday.
‘Mum?’ Harrie says. ‘It’s definitely five. I can see them.’
‘We just need a few minutes,’ I say, grabbing Molly’s witch dress from the kitchen table.
‘Mum,’ Harrie whines now, sounding just as upset as Molly did a minute ago. ‘Please. I said I’d meet them and you said I could go. Sandra is taking us. It’s not like we’re on our own.’
Harrie inches towards the front door and I must hesitate a moment too long because it swings open and before I can protest she is leaving, just as June is walking in.
‘I’ll meet you on the way round,’ I call after her. ‘Sandra said you’re going clockwise around the estate, so we’ll go the other way and we’ll bump into you at some point. Elise and June will be here to let you in if we miss each other. And make sure Sandra drops you back.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ Harrie shouts, already running down the dark street. I watch her jog towards a group of trick-or-treaters. She slows as she reaches them and I close the door and turn to June.
‘Thanks so much for doing this.’
She bats my thanks away. A pesky fly. ‘Any instructions?’ June asks.
I think of the debris from the Halloween costumes scattered across the table. ‘I … I’m sorry about the mess.’ For a moment I’m floundering, half of me still with Harrie running down the road, another part anchored here, wanting to wait for her to return. ‘No, no instructions.’
‘Mummy, can we go?’ Molly asks. She’s pulled the dress over her leggings and T-shirt and is clutching an empty plastic cauldron, ready to be filled with sweets.
June waves us off with a don’t-worry smile that radiates such kindness it almost breaks me, and then I’m pulled away into the cold night.
CHAPTER 51
Anna
It’s well over an hour before I’m home from trick-or-treating with Molly. Longer than I thought. Longer than I wanted. I searched for Harrie in every group of children but I didn’t see her. I didn’t see Sandra or any of Harrie’s friends either. They must have gone a different route.
My body is bone tired, running on empty. All I want to do is snuggle with the girls in our PJs.
‘We’re back,’ I call out as I unpeel my layers – my coat, my scarf, my hat, the extra jumper. I tried to smile for Molly, to laugh and enjoy this for her. There won’t be many more years that Molly will want my company. Soon, she’ll be like Harrie and want to go with her friends, or like Elise and decide not to bother at all. But I couldn’t keep the worry from chasing me.
I find June knitting on the sofa in the living room. Elise is sat beside her holding a ball of baby-blue wool.
‘Did you have a nice time?’ June asks.
‘Yessss,’ Molly answers. ‘Look how many sweets I got.’ She holds up the bucket. It’s overflowing with Haribo packets and lollies and eyeball-shaped chocolates. ‘You can share some with me,’ Molly says, smiling at Elise.
‘Thanks,’ she replies.
‘Is Harrie upstairs?’
A look of surprise crosses June’s face at the exact moment Elise says, ‘No, she’s not back yet.’
‘Oh.’ I check my watch. It’s been an hour and a half. ‘I’m sure she’ll be back any minute.’
‘I’ll leave you to it.’ June scoops up her wool and pats Elise’s shoulder. ‘Nice to talk to you.’ She turns to me as she leaves. ‘You know where I am, Anna, if you need me.’
‘Thank you. You’re a lifesaver.’
‘Can I watch TV?’ Molly asks the second it’s just the three of us in the house. She’s jiggling from foot to foot. Already she’s had too much sugar. There’s a rim of chocolate around her lips and her cheeks are rosy from the cold night.
‘Yes, but just while I cook the pizzas.’
‘Pizza? Yessssss. Is it a takeaway? Olivia is getting Domino’s tonight.’
I shake my head. ‘Homemade, but with extra cheese. No more treats until after dinner.’
Molly sticks out her bottom lip for a moment before skipping away to the living room.
Elise shuffles towards me. Her movements are slow, like how she drags her feet when it’s time to get in the car for Molly’s swimming lesson and she doesn’t want to go.
‘Are you hungry?’ I ask, switching on the oven. My eyes pull to the clock on the wall. Where is Harrie? ‘Pizza will be ready in ten minutes.’
She shakes her head and instead of walking upstairs, she slides into a chair at the table.
‘You have to eat something.’
‘I’ll wait until Harrie gets back.’
‘I’m sure she’ll be back any minute.’ I pick up my phone and check the messages. Nothing from Sandra on the village group.
It’s only when the pizza is on the table and Harrie isn’t back that I allow the worry to take over.
‘Where’s Harrie?’ Molly asks, the words muffled by the crust she’s eating.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, too distracted to tell her not to talk with her mouth full. I reach for my phone and message the village girlies’ chat group.
Me: Has anyone got Harrie with them? She hasn’t come back from trick-or-treating yet. @SandraBriggs she said she was meeting you at 5 p.m. Have you seen her?
Tracy Campbell: Sorry, no.
Gina Walker: She’s not here. Clarissa says Harrie wasn’t with them.
The panic circles closer and closer as the messages ping on to my phone.
Me: Really? Are you sure?
Sandra Briggs: I kept an eye on all of them and Harrie definitely wasn’t there. What costume was she wearing?
Me: A werewolf. Same as last year. If anyone sees her, please call me!
Gina Walker: Will do. Let us know when she’s home safe x
‘Mum?’ Elise’s voice drifts in the background. ‘Mum?’
My focus is on my phone and the messages I read two then three times. It doesn’t make sense. Blood rushes through my body. My head feels light. My eyes move to the clock. It’s nearly seven p.m. Harrie left the house two hours ago to meet her friends. Except she didn’t. So where is she?
‘Mum?’ The urgency in Elise’s voice startles me from my thoughts and I look up. Elise’s face has drained of all its colour. She’s pale, her eyes wide – scared – and she’s biting her bottom lip. ‘I have to tell you something.’ There’s a breathlessness about the way she says it and I wonder if I hold my own breath, stay completely still, will I be able to hear her heart beating as fast as my own?
‘Molly, sweetheart,’ I say, my eyes still fixed on Elise. ‘As a special treat, why don’t you take your pizza and eat it in front of the TV?’
‘Really? Thank you. Thank you.’ She jumps up and is gone in a flash, her pizza slices sliding around the plate. A moment later the sound of cartoons fills the silence.
I place my phone on the table and look at Elise. ‘Do you know where Harrie is?’
She nods.
CHAPTER 52
Anna
Tears swim in Elise’s eyes. ‘I’m the one who broke the fence and threw the toilet roll over the school field.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘But Harrie said it was Ben.’
‘She just said that to protect me. I wanted to tell you yesterday but Harrie wouldn’t let me. That’s why she shouted at me. She said it didn’t matter that everyone thinks it’s her, but it does. It matters to me.’
‘If you’re trying to protect Harrie—’
‘No.’ Elise shakes her head. ‘It wasn’t Harrie, Mum. It was just me. I’m sorry.’ The tears leak from her eyes and for a moment she can’t speak from the emotion gripping her.
‘It’s OK,’ I say. ‘You should’ve come to me earlier and told me, but it’s OK. It’s only toilet roll.’
She nods and takes a shuddering breath. ‘I didn’t mean for the fence to break. It fell over as I was climbing back over it. I didn’t kick it down like they said.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘We … we were at Ben’s house and Kat doesn’t mind us going out to the park by ourselves.’ She looks up, her face sheepish. ‘You wouldn’t have let us go on our own. Kat said she wouldn’t say anything.’