DS Laing looked like there was a laugh in her. She was old enough to have daughters, I guessed, maybe not daughters my age, but certainly daughters. I wondered whether this was a tradition in her household too.
‘And what was it that alerted you to someone else being in the house?’ Brooks asked.
‘Mum heard something. Well, we both heard something. There was a crack, a kind of, I don’t know, a popping noise. Mum told me to stop shuffling the clothes so we could listen, and then – and then she went to the doorway, and she saw something. Him, I guess she saw him, and then she–’
‘Did she say anything about the man she’d seen?’ Brooks asked, and Laing frowned like it was a stupid question – which it was.
‘No, no, she just – well, she hurried, to get me to hide.’
There was a heavy silence wedged between us all then, until Laing reached over and grabbed my hand. ‘You did the right thing tonight, do you know that?’
The floodgates cracked and tears poured through. ‘But I didn’t– It wasn’t– I–’
‘You would be dead,’ she interrupted me with a mother’s firmness. ‘And no mother would ever want that for their child, I promise you that much. Your mum saved you, and that’s exactly what she wanted to do.’
‘But what about– what about what I want?’
She sniffed hard. I wondered whether she might cry too. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she answered, and she sounded sincerely apologetic. ‘Your Mum, she told you to hide?’
I nodded. ‘Hide, and don’t come out. But when I knew he’d left, I left too.’
‘How long did you wait?’
‘I counted to four thousand.’
Brooks noted down the number while Laing did quick maths. ‘A little over an hour,’ she said to her colleague before facing back to me. ‘That was smart, Sarah. Waiting like that.’ It felt like a compliment, but I couldn’t thank her for it. ‘Now, I need you to think really hard for me, and I know it’s rough, but this could really help us get along. Did he say anything, anything at all, while he was in the room?’
For the fourth or fifth time I thought back through it all. It was like a horror film on playback and forth. But the only audio I had was–
‘Sarah,’ Laing interrupted me, her hand on my knee again, pulling me down. I wondered what face I’d worn; how much hurt she’d been able to see. ‘It’s okay if you can’t remember anything more right now. These things, they come back to us with a little time. Maybe it’s something we can try in a day, or two days, or whenever you’re ready. For now, could we talk a little more about what happened before he got in the room, would that be okay?’
‘I think so.’ My voice shook as though my larynx were pneumatic. I wanted to apologise again, but it seemed only right to save all my sorrys for Mum.
A knock came at the door and an officer in uniform stepped in. ‘Sarah’s guardian is here,’ he announced. ‘Should I bring her in?’
Laing looked at me. ‘Would you prefer that, Sarah?’
‘Does she know– she knows what’s happened?’ I asked and both detectives nodded in unison. ‘Then maybe it would be nice – not nice, sorry. It could be good to have her here, for someone. If that would be okay?’ I felt like I was asking a lot, even though they’d offered.
‘I’ll bring her,’ the junior officer said, without awaiting further instructions.
Only seconds later there came another knock. Madison must have been loitering close by. This time when the door opened it was her – tear-streaked and exhausted.
‘My darling girl.’ She rushed into the room and I stood to greet her. Her arms had been outstretched on her approach and she caught me inside them; my knees buckled, my shoulders shook with feeling, and she squeezed tighter as though keeping my innards in place. ‘My sweet, darling girl, I am so sorry,’ she whispered, her tears coming in time with my own. ‘I’m here. I know it’s not the same. But I’m here, and we’ll do this,’ she spoke quietly into my ear and I wanted to believe her. I counted to a hundred while we both held each other, and I greedily pulled in the smells of her perfume, hairspray, make-up. She and Mum had always used the same brands.
4
It was five days later when the same detectives turned up at Madison’s house. I moved straight in with her. I was seventeen and she wasn’t listed as my legal guardian – but everyone reasoned that if there were extenuating circumstances for a ‘child’ making their own decisions, this was probably a good example. The women, Laing and Brooks, had promised they’d keep us up to date with things. But this face-to-face discussion was the first I’d heard of any developments; or rather, I assumed they were bringing developments. They could have spoken to Madison before this without me knowing, I guessed, but from her reception to them it seemed unlikely.
‘Anything you say in front of me you can say in front of her,’ Madison snapped frankly, in response to Laing’s suggestion that I wasn’t present for whatever discussion was about to roll out. ‘There’s not much in the world that she needs shielding from now.’ I gave her a thankful smile. She was right; the time for shielding me from the world’s evils had long passed.
‘Sarah, how are you doing?’ Brooks asked, and Laing gave her that same look as before – the one that suggested she might be being stupid. And again, I couldn’t help but agree.
‘Fine,’ I lied. What else did she want? I couldn’t sleep through the night, and my clothes were stacked in the corner of the bedroom I’d moved into, as far away from the wardrobe as I could get them. The night before this, I’d woken Madison up with such vocal theatrics that over breakfast we’d talked about ripping the wardrobe out entirely. But sure, I was fine.
‘Sarah,’ Laing picked up, ‘we wondered whether anything more had come back to you, from the night of the attack.’ Madison and I swapped a look and the detective clocked it. ‘Anything you’ve remembered could be important, do you know? Even something that might seem insignificant.’
I took a deep pull of air and reached for something. ‘His breathing was raspy?’
She frowned. ‘Like asthma?’
‘I guess?’ I shrugged. ‘Or like he’d broken a window, crept around a house and then attacked someone.’ It was clear that the point of entry had been a window on the ground floor – a mere 100-and-something steps away from where we’d been, at a guess – that he’d broken and squeezed himself through. ‘I don’t remember smelling smoke. Cigarette smoke, I mean. It just sounded like he was raspy, in his breathing.’
‘Okay, and is there–’
‘He stayed with her, after.’
‘Did he do anything while he was with her?’
I thought. ‘No, there was nothing – he didn’t do anything. He just stayed. He gave himself a minute, as though he was catching his breath.’ My eyes slammed shut. ‘But his breathing was better then, I think, like maybe he’d caught his breath – during. He sat on the bed and stayed, and looked at her. It might have been a minute.’ The memory was too much so I tried to shake it away but there was no shifting it – we all knew that much.
‘This is really great stuff, Sarah, really.’ Laing reached across and touched my knee – the same way she had on the night. ‘You don’t have to push yourself, though, do you understand? If you want, we can arrange for a counsellor to come–’
‘I thought she didn’t have to push herself?’ Madison snapped, and Laing backed away from me. ‘She’ll get there when she gets there.’
‘Of course. I know it’s difficult.’
‘Do you?’ Madison cocked an eyebrow and her meaning was clear: You’ve seen a parent murdered, have you? ‘Like I said, she’ll get there when she gets there. Is this what you wanted to discuss with her today?’ Her tone became formal; it was the same one she’d used when the editor of a newspaper had called two days before and Madison, in her best business tone, had told him to, ‘Fuck off and leave us be.’ It seemed unlikely that she’d issue the same request at Laing and Brooks, but I couldn’t rule it out altogether.
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Laing straightened up. I didn’t want for us to be on bad terms with each other. She wasn’t the person who’d murdered Mum, after all; she was the one who was meant to be finding him, so it was in my best interests to keep her onside. I forced a smile at her but I knew it must look inauthentic. I hadn’t smiled in six days and it seemed unlikely that a police interview would be the experience to change it. But she acknowledged the effort, at least, pushed her hair back behind her ears and smiled in return. I half-expected the same hand to reach forward for a hand squeeze or a knee tap, but she kept that in check. It was her maternal instincts, I guessed, that kept making her want to soothe me. I wondered again how old her children were – whether she’d shove them in a wardrobe.
‘I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to hear this, but we’re still in very early days with the investigation.’ From the corner of my eye I saw Madison cock the same eyebrow as before. ‘It’s hard for us to say anything definitive at this stage, but we wanted to alert you to one or two things that have come to our attention.’ She shuffled a handful of papers that had been lying limp on her lap, but she didn’t look at them. She was steadying herself, I guessed, and I wondered whether she needed a tap on the knee for some of that magic grounding. ‘We have reason to believe the person responsible for your mother’s death might have killed another woman in the local area some weeks ago.’
She said it all in one breath, then sucked the air from the room to rehydrate her lungs. There was a hard thump in the centre of my chest and I lurched forward as though her words had physically struck me. Madison was close again, setting a hand on my shoulder and asking, ‘Darling, look at me, look at me again now.’ She was asking me to watch her breathing, to give me a crash course on how to manage it myself. This was how it felt in the morning, in the middle of the night, during every flashback, when I remembered she’d gone – that she’d been taken.
‘Sarah, darling girl, come on now.’ She crouched in front of me and held my head steady between her palms. ‘In,’ she sucked, ‘and out. We’re swimming, remember, remember we push the water away and we pull it back, to keep us moving forward.’
Mum couldn’t swim. But she agreed with Madison that it was a skill I should have. One of my earliest memories of the three of us was me and Madison swimming in a lake while Mum matched the gestures on land. Madison would always extend the offer to adult lessons and Mum would always say, ‘I’m not beautiful enough to be a mermaid.’ Which I’d always thought was a lie. The three of us would, in a fashion, swim together and Madison would always remind me to push away and pull back. ‘You have to use the water, darling girl. You aren’t fighting against it, only through it.’ She’d whispered something similar in the early hours of the morning two – or was it three? – nights ago, when she’d been reminding me how to breathe in the minutes after a nightmare.
‘I’m okay,’ I managed, ‘I think I’m okay.’
Madison stood and sat next to me then, our outer thighs pressed together. ‘So he’s done this before?’
‘It looks that way,’ Brooks answered, giving her superior a break. ‘There are certain parts of that previous crime that appear similar to this one. Given the proximity of them, it gives us good reason to believe the same person or persons might be responsible. It seems unlikely that these two incidents would be unrelated.’ She spoke in a level tone and I wondered how many times she’d had to deliver that speech or a similar one. ‘The previous incident took place nearby–’
‘Wait, I’m sorry,’ Madison interrupted. ‘Persons? You think he’s what – part of a team?’
‘Not part of a team, no,’ Brooks explained. ‘But we can’t rule out the possibility that more than one person might be involved.’
The edges of my vision were watercoloured and there was a pebble beach forming in my throat. I swallowed hard to clear the mess. ‘What about the other witness?’
‘What other witness, sorry, Sarah?’ Laing answered.
I looked from one detective to the other. ‘You said the cases were similar. This first one, and what happened to– what happened at home. So what did the other witness see? Did they see anything more than I did?’
‘There wasn’t another witness,’ Laing said plainly. ‘That’s part of what we wanted to talk to Madison about. Well, talk to you both about now. We have to consider the possibility that he didn’t know he was leaving someone behind…’
5
I’d never been a make-up sort of girl. But that morning it felt like a kind of war paint. Madison had offered to lend me some of her things, but I couldn’t stand the smell association so we’d left the house to buy new products together. It had been strange, doing a Mum activity minus a Mum, but Madison was doing her best to compensate for any shortfalls. We went to four different shops to try out five different shades of foundation and three different kinds of mascara, which left us both panda-eyed by the time we’d got home.
‘You don’t have to do this, you do know that?’ she said that afternoon when we landed hard on the two-seater together, full cups of tea and trash television at the ready. She said the same thing again from behind me in the bathroom the morning I came to use the make-up. Her worried face bounced back at me through the looking glass and I recognised her concerns all too clearly, because I’d just spent fifteen minutes trying to carefully disguise my own.
‘The police said there’s nothing to worry about.’ I tipped my head back and spread my eyes wide to get a good angle on my lashes before painting them over in black.
‘That’s absolutely not what they said, Sarah.’
‘Close enough.’
‘Absolutely not, again.’ She came and stood beside me to look at my real face rather than my mirror image. ‘They said to exercise caution and to try to carry on as best as we can until they have more information. That’s what they said.’ She landed hard on every few words as though underscoring their dictionary definitions. ‘It’s been two weeks, darling girl. That’s no time at all. Why do you think you need to do this right now?’
I yanked at the cord to turn off the mirror light. ‘Then when?’
She sighed and stepped away, giving me space to finish, manoeuvring around my getting ready. ‘What do you want for breakfast?’
‘I don’t want–’
‘Hush up. What do you want for breakfast?’ She raised an eyebrow. I’d come to see it as a staple move of hers; something about the expression made her more intimidating, and she knew it. Madison was wasted really, in not having children of her own. She had the mindset for it. ‘Toast, cereal?’
‘Toast.’ The curtness of my answer didn’t register with me until she was halfway out the door. ‘Thank you, Mad.’ She turned to face me then. ‘You know, for…’ I gestured to the room around us, meaning: the bathroom; bedroom, sans wardrobe; new make-up; fresh clothes; for sorting out whatever state had been left behind at my real home.
But she waved the gratitude away. ‘Hush again. I’ll get your toast.’
Something I’d underestimated about the return to college is that I wouldn’t be the only person there who knew my mum had been murdered. Classmates who I wasn’t on talking terms with beforehand certainly had no interest in talking to me when I went back either. In fact, they seemed to be keeping a safe distance – as though personal tragedy were something that could leap from one person to another. But the classmates who I was on talking terms with, I found out, had been rallied into the president’s office.
Landon, Tyler and Jessie were poised, like a welcoming committee, to be a part of the starting back meeting; a meeting Madison had only told me about on the drive in.
‘I didn’t want you to be worried,’ she’d said.
More worried, I thought.
‘Sarah.’ Tyler was the first to throw his arms around me. He pressed me so tight against him that I couldn’t tell whose heartbeat was knocking. ‘Babe, I’m so sorry.’
‘We’re all sorry,’ Jessie said, standing in the background, waiting
patiently for her hug. Everyone seemed to think they were afforded physical contact during grief, which was one of many things I’d learnt in the weeks before going back to college.
That said, Landon wasn’t a hugger. But he did thump me on the arm gently with a balled fist. ‘You had the finest mother of us all, Wainwright. 10/10 would have dated her.’ It was, I thought, probably one of the nicest notes of sympathy I’d had – and Mum would have loved it.
‘Sarah, do you want to take a seat?’ President Connors said from behind his desk. There was a plaque across the front branded with his name in case anyone forgot. But he was always trying to be one of those cool teacher types who insisted on students using his first name. ‘You’re welcome to call me Julian,’ he said to every new-starter, who soon learnt that Julian was certainly more generous than what students said behind his back. They were bastards really, but that can be set down to their age. Besides, I’d never been much better.
‘Thanks.’ I positioned myself between Tyler and Jessie.
‘I thought it might be helpful for us all to have this talk together, so you’re in a safe space, loved.’ Connors spoke slowly, as though I might not understand. But people had been forcing safe environments all over the place since Mum, so this kind of emotional intervention came as standard. ‘Other students are, of course, aware of everything that’s happened and I’m sure we can count on fellow students to be respectful of the situation. If there are any problems at all, though, you’re to go to a member of staff immediately. We won’t tolerate any hostility or ignorance in a situation like this.’
Situation; incident; loss. There were so many synonyms for murder. ‘Thanks, Julian, I really appreciate that. I’m sure everything will be fine.’
‘Everything will be fine,’ Landon repeated, landing hard on will as though he would personally see to it. ‘People won’t be assholes about it, Sar.’
Sincerely, Yours Page 2