Carla picked up the phone. If Nell was right, there had to be a trace of Mary somewhere in the phone bills, and if there was one, Carla was damn sure she’d find it.
Thirty-four
Now
I wish my husband had never given me her number. He should have known I would use it to torture myself, that I couldn’t resist calling her. And now they will find the call I made to her, and slowly it’s all going to unravel, just like I want it to.
That’s the part of all this my husband doesn’t understand. Why I am sabotaging my own life to be rid of hers. But it’s more that he doesn’t want to see it. His fear of losing me, of not having me in his life, makes him blind, but even he would acknowledge this is no way to live a life. Constantly fighting to be rid of Eve, to battle every day the demons of our past. No, better to be gone from here, for good this time, than continue as we are.
So I made the call. Right before I killed O’Brian. I feel no guilt for that; the man showed no compassion towards his child, so why should I to him? And I wanted to warn her she might end up the same way if she gets in the way.
But what I found out from that call was her desire to be rid of Eve matches my own. Her determination to get to the truth as insistent as mine is to hide it, because Aoife’s blood runs through her: wilful, powerful, beautiful Aoife. So as we both race to the finish line, it’s up for grabs who’ll get there first, but either way it’s Eve who will be the final prize.
Thirty-five
The Telephone Unit had finally come good. Carla opened up Connor’s phone bill: row upon row of calls he’d made and received, all presented in order of date and time, the duration of each marked down to the second.
She got the familiar buzz from knowing this was going to move things forward and sorted the lists by telephone numbers. She then highlighted all calls to or from telephone numbers belonging to the four women: Joanne, Gloria, Kelly-Anne and Eve.
She drew blanks for Joanne and Eve, but Connor’s phone had made calls to Gloria and Kelly-Anne’s phones not long before he died. Carla checked the times: the call to Kelly-Anne’s phone was timed at 22:02 and the one to Gloria’s, at 22:28.
She opened Maps on her phone and typed in the travelling times from the women’s home addresses to the flat where Connor was killed. It was impossible for either to have travelled the distance to the flat between their phone call and his death at approximately 23:00.
Carla reordered the data by time and date and searched to see the calls made and received in the time leading up to Connor’s death. Other than the two calls made by Connor’s phone, there were only two calls in any of the phone bills made around the time of his death: at 22:59 to Connor’s phone, but one at 22:45 to Joanne’s.
What if that was the killer calling to check Connor was in? But why call Joanne just before? Carla ran the number through the rest of the phone bills, but found no other calls to or from it, and a quick Google search drew a similar blank.
‘Shit.’ She was going to have to submit a request to get the name of the phone’s owner, which meant another call to the Telephone Unit.
Bremer called out from his office. ‘Problems?’ He appeared at his office door, sleeves rolled up, collar undone.
‘What you got?’ He nodded towards the phone data. ‘Anything?’
She pointed to the number highlighted in red. ‘Someone called Joanne right before they phoned Connor on the night he died.’
He walked over to the screen and peered at the numbers. ‘Have you run it through the databases?’
‘Yes, and Google. It comes back blank.’
He stared at the screen, nodding. ‘Could it be our killer?’
She didn’t want them to get ahead of themselves. ‘Let’s wait to see who it comes back to.’
‘Was the call answered?’
‘The one to Joanne was, the length of the Connor call suggests not.’
‘So why would the killer be calling Joanne?’ He held up his hand to stop her correcting him. ‘I know. We don’t know it’s the killer yet. But we’ve been working with the assumption that Joanne is in on this somehow, and she wouldn’t call herself.’
‘So maybe she isn’t our killer.’
‘But the killer knows her and Connor. So there’s definitely a link.’
‘Looks that way, yes.’
‘Could she have hired the killer? Maybe the call was to confirm that Joanne wanted her to go ahead?’
Carla considered this for a moment. ‘Could be. I’ll request financial records for her, see if she made any big withdrawals around the time of his death.’
‘Good.’ Bremer looked down at the call data. ‘Anything to link the phone number to someone called Mary?’
‘Impossible to say until I do a check on it. But there are no other calls from this phone to anyone else, so if this is our Mary, she’s very good at covering her tracks.’
‘Not as good as she thinks.’ He pointed to the screen.
‘Yeah, well, that’s the other thing. This investigation has been as sterile as they come. No forensics, limited call data. It looks like whoever murdered Connor knew what they were doing, so why make such an obvious mistake?’
Bremer considered the screen. ‘Run it through the Telephone Unit and tell them to do it on the hurry-up. If this is our killer, I want to know who it is ASAP.’
Thirty-six
Then
It takes us three weeks to pluck up the courage to go and visit Alf. We know he’s been questioned by the police because they told us not to go near him. What we don’t know is what he’s going to do about it.
We hold hands as we walk across the beach.
‘He’s going to be so mad,’ Aoife says.
‘Do you think he’ll …’ I stop talking.
‘Have found other girls?’
I nod.
‘Don’t be silly. He’ll have been pining for us – how could he not!’ She laughs and drags me across the beach towards the wall, where we sit and share the McDonald’s we picked up on the way. Aoife dips chips into my strawberry milkshake while I eat the Filet-O-Fish I only got because it reminds me of Mum. We watch the wind pick up the sea.
‘Do you think he’ll hurt us?’ I ask despite our silent vow not to speak about the things he does to us we don’t like.
Aoife looks unsure and runs her finger over the scar on her wrist. A scar that wasn’t there before Alf.
‘Maybe we shouldn’t go back?’ As the words come out I know I shouldn’t have said them because Aoife turns and looks at me with total disbelief, which soon turns to anger.
‘It’s all right for you, you’ve got your mum.’ She holds up her hand to stop me speaking. ‘No one is going to turn up in my life and rescue me like a bloody fairy princess.’ She holds her stomach. ‘I’ve got this to think about now. It’s his baby – he’s going to have to love it.’
We both know that’s not true; we are both examples of the lie that every parent loves their child. But what if he does? What if Alf does want the baby and him and Aoife become a family? Where does that leave me?
‘I’m going to tell him,’ Aoife says, ‘about the baby.’
My stomach lurches. I put down what’s left of my food. I try to be calm. On the one hand it’s getting obvious, so it would be better to tell him before he guesses. Then we’ll be in control. But on the other we risk losing him before we’ve even got him back and I’m not sure I’m ready for that just yet.
But there has been an absence in Aoife recently, like she’s gone to a place I can’t visit even if I wanted to, because that place is curled up around the baby in her womb. I miss her and sometimes it feels like I’ve lost her already and that thought takes all the wind from my lungs.
‘Come on, let’s go.’ Aoife stands, trying to brush away the mood that’s fallen, but we walk towards the café in silence. When we see its lights, she stops and takes my hand.
‘I won’t let him hurt you. If he tries, I’ll go to the police myself. There won’t be mor
e fists or burns. I promise.’
I try not to cry. I think of the mark on my shoulder that has never gone away, branding me as his, and the bruises on my thighs which come and go like night and day.
‘Aoife—’
But before she can answer, the café door opens and there’s Alf in the doorway, blocking out the light.
‘Nice to see you, girls.’ His voice feels as familiar as my own, like coming home to a warm cosy fire and a cup of hot chocolate in front of the TV. My shoulders relax and I let myself be hugged, burying my face into his jumper, smelling cooking and cigarettes, whisky and wine.
As Aoife hangs back I gesture for her to come forward.
I feel sure in this moment it is going to be all right. Alf loves me too and nothing, not even a baby, is going to get in the way of that.
Thirty-seven
While she waited for the telephone number to be checked, Carla started to dig into Joanne’s and Eve’s backgrounds. She opened Google – police databases were good, but they couldn’t compare with the World Wide Web – and it didn’t disappoint: ten minutes in and she’d got more via the press than ten hours of searching on Thames Valley’s system could ever have achieved.
As Carla scanned the articles she grew increasingly intrigued; it was as if Joanne Fowler’s and Eve’s histories were mirror images of each other, but with hairline cracks that diverted each intended course. But what if those cracks had converged, as Nell believed? Was it possible their paths had crossed before Joanne’s child had died?
Carla wrote down what she knew. Articles written during Joanne’s trial told her the woman had been taken into care at birth. She’d spent two years in a foster home – three miles from Eve’s childhood home – before being adopted by a schoolteacher and a university professor, both upstanding members of the community. The articles asked repeatedly, ‘How could a woman from such a family become the evil murderer we see now?’ All relied on lazy stereotypes about the genetics of evil – ‘some people are just born that way’. Carla didn’t believe that. For her, actions stemmed from life experiences, not a dodgy gene pool, and if the last eight years as an analyst had told her anything it was that criminals came in all shapes and sizes, from all sides of the class divide.
The papers told her Joanne had met her husband at university in Solihull and they’d married soon after graduation, living for three short months in a rented property on Cowley Road, Oxford. They hadn’t come to the attention of the police until the death of their child, which was seemingly when Eve entered their lives.
Information on Eve was harder to come by. HR held some, but it was limited and incomplete. What Carla did find was that Eve had been admitted to a Portsmouth care home aged fourteen after her stepfather’s abuse had landed her in Portsmouth General and concerns for her welfare had become too loud to be ignored. After two years Eve left the home, moved to Reading and a few years later began work as a civilian in the police – forensics, but low level, due to her lack of qualifications. After marrying Gerry, at some point Eve must have gone back to school, because ten years later she had a university degree and a job with the Home Office. But the gap of ten years was unaccounted for. Eve had not been employed by Thames Valley Police or the Home Office, and there was no account of when she had moved to Oxford, or why.
Carla turned to Google. Eve’s names – both maiden and married – drew blanks, save for cases she’d worked on after qualifying as a pathologist, so Carla typed in the care home’s details. One article appeared and she scanned it, hand poised over a mug of coffee.
The article had been written thirty-five years ago and had only found itself on the Internet after an intern – so the paper’s website told her – had studiously uploaded all past stories from the Portsmouth Chronicle onto the World Wide Web.
It detailed a gruesome murder that had rocked the seaside town. A young care-home girl had been lured to the beach by Alf Waites, a man three times her age who’d pummelled her head with a rock before setting her body on fire. No motive was given, but Waites still went down for twenty years.
The lack of a name bothered Carla and not just because it frustrated further research.
‘So invisible she wasn’t even worthy of a name,’ she muttered, noting the date of the murder. She checked Eve’s HR record – Eve would have been at the care home at the time Waites murdered the girl. She must have known her, or at the very least known of her.
Before she could google contact details for the care home, her phone rang and the number on the display told her it was the Telephone Unit.
‘Carla Brown speaking.’
‘Hi, I’ve got the details of the phone number you wanted checking, but it’s not good.’
Shit. Pay-as-you-go, then.
‘It’s a phone box.’
‘What?’
He gave the address. ‘I’ve checked either side of the two calls you identified and there were no others made from the phone box within a two-hour period either way.’
Carla didn’t need any more. She’d got her killer. No one else would have called both the victim and Joanne otherwise. She thanked him and hung up, then dialled Nell.
‘Those calls came from a call box on the street where Connor was murdered. Someone must have seen the person who used it.’
‘Right, Paul and I will do a door-to-door. You’ll tell Bremer?’
‘Yeah, will do. And there’s another thing. I think there’s a connection between Eve and a murder which happened thirty-five years ago. She’d have been fifteen, sixteen.’
‘And that helps us how?’
Carla looked at the screen showing details of the care home. ‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I do.’
Thirty-eight
Then
Alf looks to Aoife as she hangs back in the shadows.
‘Aoife?’
I nod to her but she shakes her head and it suddenly occurs to me she’s unsure of his reaction, not towards her but to the baby, and this fills me with an anger as hot as molten iron. She’s choosing the baby over herself and if she’s doing that now, then what is she going to do to me after it arrives? What role will I play?
‘Aoife’s pregnant,’ I blurt out, ignoring the look of horror on her face, ‘and it’s yours.’ Of course none of us knows if that is true or not, but it makes no difference to Alf and I see immediately he clearly realises the implications. Soon there will be living proof of his crimes and a couple of days in a cell will turn into a hell of a lot more.
Alf removes his arm from around me, walks to the window and looks out to sea. He says nothing, but the atmosphere around him changes in that weird way it can shift molecules so they charge or go still, and Alf’s are charged.
I wish I hadn’t told. I wish I could take it back and look at Aoife to say sorry, but she won’t catch my eye.
Slowly he turns around to face us, his expression a mixture of disgust and hate, and I know how bad my mistake is, but it’s too late.
‘Get rid of it,’ he snaps. ‘Privately. I’ll pay.’
Aoife is whiter than I’ve ever seen her. Her eyes stand out above the hollows of her cheeks, her pregnancy simultaneously expanding her and causing her to shrink.
‘I can’t,’ she says, her voice tiny. ‘I’m too far gone.’ She places a protective hand on her stomach and I see Alf flinch.
‘Then I’ll fucking get it out.’ He moves towards her and my heart is beating so fast I think I’m going to vomit it out of my throat. I move sideways, towards Aoife, and as I place a hand around her shoulders I realise for the first time how very scrawny she’s become; as if by becoming smaller she can somehow disappear from the world, taking her baby with her.
‘No, you won’t.’ My words sound more confident than I feel, and as Alf’s face stretches into a bastardised version of a smile, I feel any confidence I may have leave me.
‘Mary, come over here.’
‘No.’
‘Mary, I’m not asking you, I’m telling you
. Come over here.’
Those words have been said to me so many times they may as well have been branded on me with burning metal. I obey, because I’ve made my mistake and now I have to live with the consequences, whatever they may be.
Alf puts his arm around me and relief at his acceptance quells some of the panic I feel whirling like the sea outside.
‘Mary, listen to me. If this baby sees the light of day there will be no more “us”. No more new clothes or nights out – I’ll not be allowed near you. Is that what you want?’
Everything is unravelling too fast and I don’t know what to do. Alf pulls me in and as tears run down my cheeks I move in closer, desperate for his warmth and size to block out the fear I’m feeling.
‘So, you’ll help me get rid of it, yeah?’
I look at Aoife, but the panic in her eyes, like a cornered wild animal’s, makes me run from her.
‘Yes.’
His arm relaxes across my shoulders; he kisses my hair. ‘Good.’
‘No.’ Aoife’s voice is bigger than she is; it fills the room as she stands and shouts, ‘You will not kill my baby!’
And there it is. Admission it’s hers, not ‘ours’.
Alf strides across and pushes his face in hers. ‘Then I’ll bloody kill you,’ he says. But this time, Aoife doesn’t shrink or buckle under his threat; instead she says:
‘Go ahead. Kill me.’
So Alf obliges and slams her head into the table.
Thirty-nine
Nell unclicked her seat belt and picked up her notebook from the footwell. She looked down the street where a lone man was walking his shopping home, shoulders hunched from the weight. She nodded to the phone box across from the flat. ‘That must be the one, but check the number just in case.’
‘Will do. Positioned well, if you wanted to check on the occupants of the flat,’ Paul added.
When I Lost You Page 16