Robin nodded. ‘That’s my theory.’
Jude shook her head. ‘No. It can’t be right. She wasn’t pregnant when she disappeared.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because I am.’ Emphatic. ‘Mirry and I shared everything. We were very close. There’s no way she’d be pregnant and not tell me.’ An entirely humour-free laugh. ‘The idea of it – it’s almost funny.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She just wasn’t like that. I was the feistier one of us, and even I wouldn’t have dreamt of … I mean, no. No way. Even if that kind of thing had been countenanced in our family. Or even given the opportunity to be countenanced.’
‘“That kind of thing”?’
‘Boys. Sex – any kind of personal interaction with the opposite sex. We were kept on a very tight lead, it wouldn’t have been possible – we were accounted for every minute of the day. School, music, church group, home – that was our circuit. I hadn’t even kissed anyone when I went to university; I was twenty before I saw a man naked.’
She stopped as another realization dawned. ‘Oh.’ She sat back, eyes wide. ‘If you are right, if the girl is her daughter, Miriam couldn’t have been killed when she was taken – she must have been kept alive. Alive to get pregnant – alive long enough afterwards to give birth to a baby.’ She took a sharp in-breath. ‘Maybe still alive.’
Robin held up her hands: slow down. ‘If I’m right, and it’s a huge if. I’ll be completely honest with you – it’s my case, I’m leading this new investigation, and we’re struggling. We can’t identify the young woman, we’re running out of angles to try, and there’s a strong possibility I’m clutching at straws here. I’m fully aware of that and I need you to be, too. But it is a straw and that’s more than we’ve got anywhere else. If I’m wrong, though, I know I’ll have caused you a lot of distress and disappointed hope.’
Jude nodded slowly, absorbing, but the light was still in her eyes. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘If there’s a chance, we should take it.’
‘Thank you.’
‘What can I do? What do you need from me?’
‘Well, to start with, I have some questions.’
‘Okay.’
‘In your mind,’ Robin said, ‘over the years, what have you thought happened? Did you believe Miriam was abducted? Or did you ever think she might have run away?’
Jude shook her head. ‘No, I never thought she’d run away. The police asked me that over and over again. Did my sister have a boyfriend? Did she have a crush on anyone? Had anyone shown an unusual interest in her?’
‘And you said no?’
‘No to all of it. And yes,’ she said, pre-emptively, ‘I would have known.’
‘How about online? Could someone have found her that way?’
‘Groomed her, you mean? No.’
‘How so sure?’
‘We didn’t have a computer. We begged for one but we weren’t allowed.’
‘It sounds quite strict, your childhood.’
‘It was definitely … sheltered. There were some things that bothered us for sure – we didn’t have a television, either, for example, so we never knew what the other kids at school were talking about, that was a pain, and our clothes weren’t exactly cutting-edge, shall we say. Later, when I went to college, I did feel incredibly naive. Everyone else was so much more worldly, so much surer of how things worked, more confident. And my alcohol tolerance,’ she shook her head. ‘I had one glass of sherry at my professor’s welcome drinks and I was wasted. But you know, it felt like care. Mirry and I always felt safe. Our parents loved us to bits and they wanted us to be safe.’
‘You were churchgoers,’ she asked. ‘Religious?’
‘Yes. Or my parents were, and so we were, too. Back then.’
‘Not now?’
‘It’s hard to keep believing in a benevolent God when your family’s picked off one by one.’ She pulled her lips in over her teeth and pressed them together for several seconds. ‘You’re not a believer.’ It was a statement.
Robin was surprised. ‘No, I’m not,’ she said. ‘I don’t believe in a God, benevolent or otherwise, or any kind of grand scheme. No one’s in charge of all this, there’s no plan. It’s just … chaos, good and bad in a constant state of flux, and I try to weigh in for the good.’
Jude nodded. ‘That makes sense to me. When Mirry went, bad definitely had the upper hand for a long time. Things are better now.’
‘I’m glad.’ Please, Robin thought, don’t let this be a disaster. Don’t let me have dredged this all up again for nothing.
Jude reached for a tissue from a box next to the kettle then crushed it into a ball in her fist. ‘Unless,’ she said slowly, ‘she was pregnant. Or thought she might have been. Maybe that would have been enough.’
‘Sorry, I don’t follow.’
She took a deep breath. ‘If she was attacked. Before she disappeared.’
‘Attacked? You mean, raped?’ She couldn’t say it, Robin thought.
A single nod.
‘You don’t think she would have told your parents? Or you, given you were close.’
‘I don’t know.’ Now she was struggling to hold back tears. ‘I want to say yes, she would have told me, but I don’t know if it’s true. I was younger than her, I was only thirteen, and she would have wanted to protect me. Also …’ She stopped.
‘What?’ Robin asked as gently as she could.
‘I think she’d have thought it was her fault.’ She blinked and a tear slipped down her cheek. ‘She would. She would have seen herself as to blame.’
‘Why?’
‘She was … Miriam was really serious about her faith. And our group was quite … old-fashioned in how they interpreted the Bible.’
‘In what way?’
‘Intolerant, really. Homosexuality was all Sodom and Gomorrah, of course, and women … Women were difficult for them. Even at thirteen I thought that – like, why did we have to hear about the bad women all the time, Jezebel and Delilah and co? Why emphasize them? Eve and the serpent, Herodias. Why did Mirry and I leave feeling ashamed of ourselves quite often, like we’d done something wrong or at least like we were going to and it was only a matter of time?’
She wiped away two tears, one from each cheek.
‘Mirry internalized that idea, I know she did, she internalized everything because she really did want to be good. If something had happened to her, a man, she would have thought she’d done something to make it happen. That she’d tempted him with her evil woman’s wiles and she deserved it.’
For a moment neither of them spoke. I thought your parents wanted to keep you safe? Robin wanted to say. They wouldn’t let you have a bloody television but they exposed you to this vicious bullshit? In your early teens – and presumably before? She felt furious at their mother in particular: how could she have let this stuff reach her daughters’ ears? How self-hating did you have to be? But then, she thought, perhaps their mother had been brought up to believe it, too.
‘You haven’t told me why you formed your theory,’ Jude said. ‘How did you even know about Miriam?’
Robin explained how she’d shown the scene photos to Maggie and triggered her memory of the news story. She picked her bag off the floor and took out the folder. ‘I brought some pictures with me. I’ve got an e-fit we had done so that we could release it – I’ll show you that first and then you can tell me if you think you can manage a photograph from the scene.’
‘Okay.’ Jude stood and went to the counter along the back wall where she moved a bolt of fabric with a marbled blue pattern and switched on two spotlights clipped to the shelf above. The counter, Robin noticed, was edged with a fixed brass ruler for measuring cloth. She laid the e-fit down and waited.
‘It’s hard to say,’ Jude said, looking at it. ‘I mean, objectively I can say, yeah, I see that she’s got the same kind of nose as my sister – and me – and the hair’s similar, but beyond that …’
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br /> ‘Can I show you a photograph?’
She hesitated then nodded.
Robin had been careful to choose the least distressing, a head shot taken at the scene, the closest she could get to their girl looking asleep. She lay on her back, face surrounded by waves of dark hair, her skin so pale under the freckles on a nose that, like Jude said, was very similar to her own. She put it gently down and waited.
Jude was quiet for several seconds. Then she nodded again. ‘I can see why you came.’
She looked at the picture for a long time, perhaps fifteen or twenty seconds, and then sat down heavily and was silent for longer. ‘I don’t know how to feel,’ she said eventually, looking at Robin as if she might have the answer. ‘I don’t know whether to feel horrified – I am horrified, that poor, poor girl – but another part of me is …’ She flung her hands up. ‘Because if she is her daughter, then Mirry didn’t die.’
‘At least not immediately,’ Robin warned. ‘She may have died since. And again, they may not be related.’
‘But if she is her daughter,’ Jude said, ‘and if Mirry is alive now, then her daughter is dead.’
Into the silence that followed, the church bells struck the half-hour, and almost immediately, someone tried the shop door. Jude jumped and Robin saw relief on her face: thank God, an excuse to step away from this nightmare for a moment. ‘Do you mind if I …?’
‘No, please.’
Jude went into the front room and she heard her talking to a woman, something about a sister’s birthday. Then there were two pairs of feet in the shop, followed by the rustle of tissue paper and the chunter of the card machine. After the bell over the door, Robin heard the keys again. Jude returned a minute later. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve put a note up now.’
‘No, I’m sorry to have come on a Saturday. It’s probably your busiest day.’
‘It doesn’t really get busy till about eleven, though. She was driving to see her sister in Edinburgh and she knew what she wanted so …’
‘Do you do well here? I mean, it looks like you must – your designs are great, really unusual, and the shop.’ She very much wanted her to be a success, she realized, two fingers to everything she’d had to contend with. She remembered her good-looking husband and was pleased again.
‘The shop does pretty well,’ Jude said. ‘The overheads are quite steep, especially the rent, but it’s part of the brand, I use it for social media, and I make most of my profit from the website. We pack up individual things for people who call or email,’ she gestured at the mail sack, ‘but I have a little warehouse now with a full-time employee who deals with the fabric orders and anything multiple.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Thanks. I love the shop, even though it’s a ton of work. It was always my dream.’
‘Really? Not the design part?’ She’d gone to Glasgow School of Art, Robin had read on her site, which even she knew was pretty prestigious.
‘That, too, but I like the business side. My husband blames it on Barbara Taylor Bradford.’
It took Robin a moment. ‘The novelist?’
‘I read A Woman of Substance as a teenager – world dominion from a single shop in the North.’ She smiled.
‘That must have been a bit much, as far as your parents were concerned, all those gold letters. Racy!’
Another smile but fainter. ‘They didn’t know – told you I was the rebellious one. It was probably the title that drew me in, thinking about it – I was probably looking for a counterweight to all those biblical scarlet women. But I was rebellious, after Mirry. I was so angry. I was angry at God and I didn’t care about the stupid rules any more. What was the point? He wasn’t good, and they didn’t keep you safe.’ She shook her head. ‘Also, my parents took their eye off the ball big time – they were broken. And everything else, too – the whole structure of our lives.’
Robin nodded. Trauma seeped.
‘The whole community changed, it wasn’t only our family. Obviously at school I was an even bigger freak than before, The Girl Whose Sister Was Taken, and the parents – I knew they felt sorry for us but they were also a bit afraid of us, like it might be contagious. I could feel it in our church group, even – like the devil had reached out and touched us personally. No fault of our own, of course, probably,’ her eyebrows flicked, ‘but still way too close for comfort.’
‘Was it a support to your parents, the group? Their faith?’
‘I don’t know. Their faith, yes, but not the group, at least not long-term. It broke up a few months afterwards – our leader had a crisis of faith. I think he was like me, struggling to believe in goodness when something like that could happen, and he felt like a fraud. He wanted us to have someone who actually believed the words coming out of his mouth. He ended up going abroad to run a charity eventually, said at least it was something practical. But the group was falling apart anyway. One family had joined another group suddenly, as if they couldn’t stand to be around us any more, and another family moved away. Everything just crumbled.’
‘And then your father.’
‘Yes. That was the worst,’ she said simply. ‘For people even to have the idea that my lovely dad could … It makes me feel actually sick. And then my mum, too. You know about that?’
‘I spoke to DI MacDonald at Northumbria – he was DC then, I think. He had another look at the case in 2003.’
Jude nodded. ‘I remember him, Frazer, he was kind. I got the impression that he’d been told to cut his losses and stop investigating quite a while before he did, but he stuck his neck out for us. He looked in on us a few times even after he’d had to stop, too.’
‘Your mum died of cancer?’
‘She did. I think her body gave up, basically – she was so low when she got it, she had no physical reserves left to fight with. It’s a terrible thing to say, and I know she felt bad about leaving me, but I think part of her was grateful. She wanted to be done.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seventeen when Dad died, nineteen when she did. I deferred university to stay with her.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Like I said, things are better now. I’ve got all this going on,’ she waved her hand around, ‘and I’m married – oh, right, you knew that: Mrs Everleigh.’ She smiled. ‘John. We met at university, we were in the same year, which we wouldn’t have been if I hadn’t deferred, so … Not evidence of some grand divine plan but definitely a major silver lining. We lived in sin before we got married,’ she smiled again. ‘I insisted.’
Chapter Thirty
The motorway again, the city exits rolling by in reverse order. Staying under ninety was even harder now – she’d jogged back to the car, bag clamped under her elbow, the DNA swab from Jude’s cheek zipped carefully into the interior pocket. She was heading straight to the station to put it in for processing.
Jude had watched her label it. ‘If you’re right,’ she’d asked, ‘do you think it means Mirry’s in Birmingham?’
Robin heard the hope she was trying to disguise. ‘I don’t know. There’s no evidence one way or the other. Our victim’s old enough to have been living there independently.’
And the e-fit was everywhere. If Miriam was in Birmingham, she thought as she passed under gantries signposting York and Leeds, why hadn’t she come forward? Had she somehow not seen it? Or had she seen it but not recognized her – was that possible? What if she hadn’t seen her for years, or even since she was born, if she’d given her up for adoption or her daughter been taken from her, into care? Or illegally. But then, if Maggie had made the connection, twenty years later, having never met either of them, wouldn’t the girl’s own mother?
Then what if Miriam had seen her, had recognized her, but still hadn’t come forward? What if she was scared to contact the police or someone was stopping her?
What if she was dead, too? Murdered.
Among the countless unknowns, one thing seemed certain: if the Gisborne Girl was Miriam’s daughter,
there had to be a chance – a strong chance – that her murder was linked to what had happened to her twenty years ago.
‘If your DNA does show a familial link,’ she’d told Jude, ‘we’ll access the files from Miriam’s case straight away, but I want to start making some enquiries in the meantime, too.’ She’d made some tea and they’d drawn up a list of everyone Jude remembered Miriam knowing. Robin had struggled to hide her hunger for information: she couldn’t risk getting Jude’s hopes up any further or going off down a blind alley herself and wasting time.
But it didn’t feel like a blind alley.
And as the road disappeared between her wheels, another idea was growing, taking on shape and weight.
The Gisborne Girl’s killer had been immaculate, leaving no trace of himself at the scene. There was nothing exceptional about that but the pains he’d taken to prevent them identifying the victim were less common. What if, Robin asked herself now, that had been another step in concealing his own identity? If they worked out who she was, would she lead them to him?
Robin pressed her spine against the seat-back, straightened her arms.
Could the Gisborne Girl’s killer be her father?
There was a service station coming up; she moved into the inside lane. As soon as she stopped, she got out her notebook and started writing, questions and ideas filling a page in a couple of minutes.
It was physical, the sense of being on to something, she felt buzzy and over-caffeinated. To burn some of the energy while she thought, she got out and set off around the car park at a fast walk.
If she was right, where did Lara Meikle fit in? She’d shown Jude three photographs of her – three different hair colours – but she’d looked carefully at each of them then shaken her head. ‘No, I don’t recognize her.’
‘She was only twenty-three, so she’d have been a toddler at the time Miriam went missing, if you knew her back then. Her name’s Lara Meikle – does that sound familiar?’ Was that why they hadn’t been able to find the link between the two women, she wondered; it was twenty years old?
But Jude had shaken her head again. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone called Meikle at all.’
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