If They Knew

by Joanne Sefton

  Slowly, the bare facts settled in Helen’s whirling mind. Her mother, Barbara, wasn’t ‘Barbara’ at all. She’d always known her mother had a secret, but this was more than she could ever have conjured in any flight of imagination. Far from the daydream of her glamorous mother stepping down in the world to marry for love, she had been a criminal on the run from a murky past. Helen was convinced that this secret changed everything – but how, exactly? Her scrambled brain struggled to keep up and to join the dots between this news and poor Barney.

  ‘But why was she in prison? What had she done?’ asked Neil.

  Helen could tell they were thinking the same thing, that it must have been serious for her to need a new identity. Veena wasn’t talking about a spot of shoplifting. Helen was caught off-guard by a spasm of fury. It was all about Barbara; it always had been. She’d led her husband, then her daughter, through a merry dance of lies and deceit, letting them think she was the victim, when it sounded as if she was nothing of the sort. And now Barney was somehow caught up in this dark web, and Helen hadn’t been able to protect him because Barbara had kept it all from her. She thought of the years of trying to be close to her mother and feeling shut out, of all the hours of worry about her cancer. When had Barbara ever done anything to earn her daughter’s concern?

  Veena glanced downwards, her voice dropping. ‘Manslaughter.’

  ‘What!’ Neil slammed his hand on the table. ‘This is crazy, it’s just …’

  ‘Dad, wait. We need to hear her.’

  ‘I’m not sure of the details. I don’t want to tell you anything that turns out to be not quite right.’ Veena looked tired suddenly. ‘It’s an old, old case, as you can imagine. We’ve got people looking for records but …’ She shrugged.

  ‘So what do you know?’ Helen said, fighting to keep her voice even.

  ‘The victim was a young child, a girl called Mary Gardiner. The families lived a few streets away from each other.’

  ‘So Barbara knew this child, or what?’ Neil asked, frowning.

  Veena hesitated. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious. ‘Like I said, we’ve not got the full picture yet. We’ve called up the papers from archive, but stuff that old isn’t scanned in. I don’t know what they’ll be able to find.’

  ‘Is there anything else you can tell us? You said something about gene testing, and this new identity being compromised?’ Helen made a conscious effort to fight back her own emotions and placed a soothing hand over Neil’s, which was turning white with the force of his grip on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘This is coming from your mother. She stressed repeatedly to our officers that she’d kept this secret for fifty years. After all that time, she’d thought it would be safe to give the hospital details of her family so they could carry out these tests – to do with her cancer.’

  Helen was still puzzled. ‘Okay. But what makes her think that’s caused a problem? What links Barney – or even what happened to Mum at the General – with all this stuff from her past?’

  ‘Good question. Your mother had told us that Mary had a twin. A twin called Jennifer.’

  Veena then swung into interrogatory mode, wanting to go over again every bit of information about the Jennifer notes. Helen found herself reeling too much to protest. Could her mother really be a murderer? The bit of her that should have screamed no was oddly silent. After the initial shock, she felt only numbness and the hard, hard ache for her own missing child.

  Helen and Neil sat together long after Veena had retreated to the kitchen to call in to her supervisors. As far as Helen was aware, Veena would have gleaned nothing new about the notes from their conversation, which had largely gone round in circles. That was exactly what Helen’s mind continued to do, as she half listened to Neil making his own attempts to make sense of any of it.

  The thing she kept coming back to was the gene testing. As far as Helen understood, the point of identifying a family history was to help women who didn’t yet have the disease. Barbara already had cancer – it had been found through a mammogram and confirmed by the hospital. What use were the records of her mother and sister? Barbara had managed to keep this secret all her life, as her daughter knew only too well. It seemed odd that she’d let it crumble so unnecessarily. And with such terrible consequences.

  But Neil didn’t share her surprise.

  ‘You didn’t see how the diagnosis hit her, Hels,’ he told her. ‘She was always sharp as a tack, but it was as if she suddenly lost all her sharpness, her confidence. She didn’t know what to do with herself. It makes sense that there was breast cancer in the family. She suddenly felt there was a connection with them, realised she couldn’t sever it completely, however hard she’d tried in the past.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Helen, vaguely. But her mother had been switched on enough to spin a story about the notes coming from a woman who had harassed her for years. If they had started as a result of the cancer diagnosis then they were recent. What possible reason had she had for deliberately encouraging Helen down the wrong track? And if she’d already done that once, then who was to say she wouldn’t do it again?

  Her thoughts were interrupted by her father’s voice. Every so often, Neil would say the name aloud, wonderingly – ‘Katherine Clery’; ‘Katy, Katherine’; ‘Katy Clery’ – as if he was trying to make it fit the woman he’d lived with for most of his days. Helen opened her mouth but found she had no words for him. It was all she could do to squeeze his hand.

  Neil

  Eventually, they let Neil go to the hospital. As he drove, his mind raced, kicking and stumbling over the unfamiliar name that supposedly applied to his wife of over forty-five years. She wasn’t Katy; she was Barbara – a name that in his mind spun elegantly like a ballerina in pirouette or the handworked spindle of a crafted chair. Katy, on the other hand, lurched like a seesaw, unremarkable before today, but now horrific and alien.

  What Katy Did. Word association – the title of the book jumped into his mind, along with an image of the paperback cover that Helen had as a kid, a girl in pigtails on a swing. He didn’t know what it had been about; she was old enough to do her own bedtime reading by that time.

  Neil didn’t know What Katy Did.

  Neil didn’t know what Katy had done.

  Barbara wasn’t a killer. Barbara was prickly and opinionated and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Barbara was quick-witted, thoughtful and generous in word in deed. But then the shadows started to crowd in. Barbara had never wanted children. Barbara had never fallen in love with Helen in quite the way that Neil had. Barbara had had to cut herself the day she met her baby grandson. But he fought back his doubts: Barbara wouldn’t hurt a hair on any child’s head. Barbara, whatever her faults, wasn’t a child-killer. But was Katy?

  Of course he’d been curious over the years about his wife’s mysterious silence. He’d imagined some sort of scandal – probably a pregnancy, perhaps a married man. When they were married, Neil was hardly ‘experienced’ himself, but even back then he sensed something off-kilter in Barbara’s sexuality, an underlying fear, or perhaps shame, that didn’t sit easily. It turned out that, for Neil, his instinct to heal, to protect, was stronger than his need to know.

  In fact, what he’d told Helen was largely true – he’d learned to live with the silence like people learned to live with a bereavement, or a missing limb – after a time, it becomes normality. Plenty of men would have struggled more than him, he supposed, plenty couldn’t have married her without finding out the truth. It wasn’t only women who felt the need to look in Bluebeard’s cupboard. But not everyone. Not Neil.

  Once, he recalled, he’d dropped a hint that he knew about the phone calls to Liverpool. It wasn’t even that long ago, sometime after Barney was born. Barbara didn’t take him up on it, her lips pursed, clam-tight. That night she had brushed past the dresser, knocking off a vase that had been a wedding present from his parents. It smashed beyond repair. An accident. A coincidence.

  When he arrived at
St Aeltha’s, Barbara was alone, and asleep. He allowed himself to gaze at her. With her sculpted cheekbones and dark hair spread across the pillow, she was still beautiful, in his eyes at least. He touched her arm, then her hair. He felt the need to reassure himself that she remained the same person, that Katy Clery was Barbara Marsden and not some new creature that had emerged, leaving only the shed skin of his wife behind.

  Eventually, her eyes flickered open and the question in them was unmistakable.

  ‘Yes. They told me,’ he whispered. His voice shook as he tried to control the emotion rising in him. ‘You let me think you were the victim, Barbara. You let me think that for fifty years. How could you?’

  His voice was rising and he heard the clack of heels in the corridor. He exhaled a slow, shaky breath.

  A fat tear welled beneath Barbara’s eye.

  ‘I’m sorry it had to be like this, Neil. I’m so, so sorry …’

  ‘Then tell me what happened. It’s time, surely?’ He leaned forward, a drowning man grasping for a lifeline. He stared at her, desperate to turn back the clock, to go back to the before, when she’d just been Barbara, his wife, the love of his life.

  ‘I didn’t kill her.’ Her eyes pleaded with him, tears glistening as she struggled to keep her voice even. ‘No one’s ever believed me, but you have to.’

  She inched her hand forward and grasped his own and relief flooded him. His anger withered instantly. Something told him she was telling the truth. He knew her better than anyone; even though he’d never known about Katy, he’d known Barbara. And Barbara wouldn’t lie to him now.

  ‘Thank God. I knew it!’

  It was only when he saw the pain flicker across her face that Neil realised he was crushing her hand in his grip.

  He tried to press her for more, but she could only tell him how tired she was.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ she said, unknowingly echoing Veena’s words to him. ‘Things were very different back then.’

  Before long, sleep took her again; she murmured as she slipped away. He picked out the name Gardiner, and another that sounded like Stephenson. The rest was incoherent, so much so that he wasn’t sure if it was speech at all. Eventually she slept peacefully, and Neil wept fierce tears all over the bedcover.

  March 1968

  Katy

  The deal was this: she would get a new birth certificate, National Insurance, all the documents. There would be a reference for work, and a place in a hostel paid up for the first six months. Katy’s return home had gone so badly wrong so quickly that she actually moved into the hostel before all the paperwork was sorted out. Before that there had been two nights on the sofa of an old school friend, and three nights in police cells for her own protection.

  ‘It’s all arse about tit,’ said Abe, the probation officer, who was a fan of plain speaking. Katy smiled to herself to think what Eric Robertson would have made of his language. ‘I said we should set up a new identity before you were released, but those at the top said it could only be done for a witness, not an offender. Well, here we are, worse things happen at sea. I’m sure you’re not the first, not that they would tell me one way or another.’

  It was easy for him to say, thought Katy. He wasn’t being bundled into a new life drawn up for him in five minutes on the back of a fag packet.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ He gestured vaguely around the long narrow attic room she was now to call home.

  ‘Does it matter what I think?’ Katy picked at a thread in the Indian throw draped over the bed. There was only one chair in the room, and Abe was sitting in it. She had her legs drawn up under her to one side because otherwise they would be in danger of touching his. Stephenson liked to call it her ballerina pose.

  ‘Well, you could always turn me down,’ he said, calmly, ‘but I think we both understand that wouldn’t end well.’

  ‘So it doesn’t matter.’ She was smiling at him, enjoying his discomfort.

  He shrugged. ‘Well, you do get to pick your own name, not many people can say that.’

  She’d had a couple of days to mull it over, when the talk of this plan first started over at Canning Place station. But she still wasn’t quite sure.

  ‘Do I have to decide today?’

  Abe sighed. ‘Preferably. We need to get things moving. And the fewer people round here who ever knew you were Katy Clery, the more likely things are to work out well for you.’

  ‘Barbara, then – I’ll be Barbara.’ She’d spent the last twenty-four hours trying to decide. Until the name left her lips she’d still not been totally sure it was the one she would go for.

  ‘Surname?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Have you picked a surname?’ His voice was slow and patient, like a nursery teacher.

  Katy – Barbara – hesitated. She hadn’t expected to have to change her surname too, but now she felt stupid not to have realised. She didn’t want to admit it to Abe.

  ‘Stanwyck,’ she blurted.

  He smiled. ‘Are you a fan? She’s one of my mum’s favourites.’

  ‘It was my dad who liked her,’ Katy admitted. ‘He used to take me to the pictures on a Saturday.’

  ‘I know it’ll be hard,’ said Abe, suddenly serious, ‘to have to cut them all off.’

  Katy shook her head. ‘He’s dead. He died before … well, before any of this.’

  Was she glad about that? She knew about the whispers, about how Hugh Clery was lucky to have passed on without having to witness the shame brought on his family by his daughter. They never paused to wonder whether the shame might not have landed if he’d still been around. Katy still talked to him; in fact, if she prayed to anyone, it was to him, careless of the heresy of praying to the dead, rather than for them. Even if she couldn’t keep in contact with Ma, or Sonia or the others, she could speak to her dad just as well if she was Barbara Stanwyck, and that brought a little unexpected comfort.

  Abe’s scratchy cough intruded into her thoughts.

  ‘I’m afraid it can’t be Stanwyck,’ he said gently. ‘It’s too noticeable. People will comment. Any other ideas?’

  She was tired now, tired of this surreal conversation, tired of Abe and of holding herself so carefully in this confined space. Her eyes cast around the room, landing on the two books leaning against the side of the small shelf. One, perhaps inevitably, was a Bible, the other an old children’s book with its cover torn off. The lettering on the spine was clear, though: Just So Stories.

  ‘Kipling,’ she said. ‘Will that do?’

  ‘Barbara Kipling it is,’ Abe confirmed, making a note. ‘Now, last thing, I’ll get the job references made up in a day or two. The firm’s name will be Hewlitts, and any telephone enquiries will come through to my secretary. Do you have any skills? What do you want to be?’

  ‘A journalist,’ she said, shyly.

  ‘You’ll have to work that out for yourself, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’ve got shorthand.’

  ‘Can you type?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Secretary it is then. Don’t worry, I’ll tell them you’ve got an imaginative mind and the potential to go far.’ He riffled through the papers and waved one with the reform school name emblazoned across the top. ‘I’m not even lying – your man Robertson himself said it. You made an impression on him, Barbara.’

  Katy looked at him blankly for a heartbeat, then nodded.

  August 2017

  Helen

  He wasn’t back for bedtime. She watched the hands of the clock slip treacherously onwards: 20.00, 20.30, 21.00. Without a CCTV sighting, Julie’s guestimate of the abduction as taking place just before four p.m. was the best they had to go on. Barney should be asleep by now. Another tear slid through her fingers as she stood staring at his empty bed, hoping against hope that he was warm and safe with Rabbit.

  Veena, back on shift following an afternoon break, had gently discouraged any idea of Helen leaving the house, not barring her as such, but insinuating that it wo
uld be easier for them all if she didn’t. Actually, much of Helen’s interaction with Veena had a similar feel. It wasn’t so much a silk glove concealing an iron first as a consoling hug concealing a forced restraint. Short breaks aside, the detective sergeant had now been camped out at the house for more than twenty-four hours. With every cup of tea she made, every time she picked up the phone, every little job she got the hidebound uniformed PCs to do, she seemed to be putting up bars around the house, around their lives. Helen knew as well as Veena did that those bars could protect her or imprison her. The decision was still in the balance.

  So when the doorbell went, Veena rose smoothly to answer it. They’d already stopped the pantomime of Helen or Neil standing up and Veena ushering them back to their seats and reminding them that they didn’t want to be doorstepped by a reporter who had managed to blag his way past the uniforms. Now, with Neil still at the hospital, Helen just let Veena go and waited meekly to see what came of it.

  This time was different, however. This wasn’t a muttered consultation on the doorstep.

  ‘I’ve had more than enough questions from your lot, thanks, and I don’t care if you’re Stella-sodding-Rimington,’ came Darren’s raised tones from the hallway. ‘I’m coming in and I’m going to see my wife.’

  He marched into the room, trailing Veena, startled, in his wake. Helen rose to greet him, thinking wryly that it was the first time she’d seen Veena’s composure slip and that perhaps it was no surprise that Darren would be the one to achieve that. Before she could worry about how to greet him, particularly in front of spectators, he’d pulled her into his arms. Her head turned automatically to rest against his collarbone and she closed her eyes, feeling a little of the tension flow out of her. In spite of herself, she let her shoulders drop and clung to him.

  ‘Darling, darling, Hels,’ he was muttering into her hair, ‘Barney’s out there. We’ll find him, I promise.’

  Guilt needled her. She’d been absolutely ready to believe it was him. Some stunt put on to get his own way or else to pay her back for not agreeing to let him take the kids back to London when he’d first asked. But then, she could hardly be blamed for looking for reasons why he might have taken Barney – not when the alternative was the hell she was going through now. Darren had turned back to Veena, now, still with one arm wrapped tight around Helen’s shoulders. She breathed the spice of his cologne, underscored with a tang of anxiety.