A reporter fills the screen now, and behind her I see the familiar winding footpath over the grassland up to the pond. I feel sick. I can see police cars up there and I scan the background.
‘Police say that they have no further details of the new witness, just a detailed report of someone seen running away from the alleged crime scene the same evening. Investigations continue.’
They go back to the studio and my heart is thumping in my chest. I see the children playing with Danny Snr as he’s arguing with Vi all through a kaleidoscope of confusion. She ran away. Why is Dougie doing this? Why can’t he accept it?
My head is spinning as the reporters in the studio go over the timeline, Dougie’s various campaigns and denials. There is a map of our street, with the dirt path highlighted.
‘So was this area not searched in the original inquiry?’ asks a female reporter.
The man with the map explains. ‘Yes, Jane, it was, briefly, as Alice Peters was a registered missing person. But with no clues to go on, it was difficult to know where to begin the search. The police formerly had no evidence of anyone in the area at the time. But with the new evidence that has been submitted, evidence that clarifies previous evidence, they feel that the case can be re-opened and the area investigated. But at this stage it remains an informal investigation only. As stated earlier, someone must know something about this case and now is the time to come forward.’
There is more footage of police cordoning off the area around the pond. Dougie Peters standing behind the police cordon, staring into the distance, holding the photograph of Alice and her mother that I have seen in their house so often.
I feel physically sick. From grief and from guilt and from shock. I know every inch of the area around the rocks and I would have known if the ground up there had been disturbed. But that was back then, without hindsight. That was without the knowledge of what happened next, the claustrophobic atmosphere that contained us all on that small avenue.
I know the panic is growing inside me, and I almost sense my mother pulling herself up inside herself, all her relaxed attitude ebbing into uncertainty and then fear as she rapidly realises what is happening. When they don’t find Alice up there, she will work it out. She will know that I was telling the truth. But she didn’t help me then and she won’t help me now.
I turn back into the room, towards my children and towards Danny Snr, who is now hugging Vi tightly. I jolt, reminding myself that this really has nothing to do with me, and no one can prove otherwise. And even then, I can defend myself, tell the truth. Yes. Nothing to worry about. I was the one who was hurt. I just don’t understand why this has come up now.
Donelle arrives and talks about Ian, who works in the legal department at the council. She sings his praises, tells us he is newly single and is well up for a relationship. Loves Chinese food, not worried about her being away with her job. Which sounds better than before.
‘Taking it to the next level …’
She high-fives Danny Snr and we all laugh. Then it’s time to go and we sing all the way home in the car. Then the kids are getting ready for bed. I am sad. Every day used to be far too short, a disappointment at the end because there was never more time to spend with those people. But now I am counting down until the next time I can be alone to obsess over who is messaging me.
When Jennifer and Simon are tucked up in bed, I put on Sky news and wait. And wait. And wait. For what seems like a lifetime for the report to appear again. The same report repeats and I watch it closer than close for any ‘further details’ but all I see are police cars and blue lights bouncing off my childhood playground. I am mesmerised by my avenue on TV, like an extra insight into my life from different angles now. The camera pans onto Dougie’s house and I see the books through the window, the shelving and the layered photographs that sparked my jealousy as a teenager.
Why couldn’t my parents be like him? Instead of super tidy and minimalist. Why couldn’t they be laid back and lounge in the back garden in hats drinking gin and tonic? Rather than Dad’s constant window vigil and Mum’s flowery apron kitchen uniform, which she tried to overlay on me one Christmas as she attempted to teach me to cook? I remember asking her what happened to Dougie’s wife and she just stood there, shaking her head and glancing at Dad under her lashes. I stayed for ages, expecting her to tell me when he wasn’t listening. Like she’d told me about periods when she was drunk the preceding Boxing Day even though I had started mine years before.
But she didn’t. She never mentioned it again. Every time I brought it up she walked out of the room, making herself busy. She kept quiet back then, just like she did when I asked her about pregnancy and sex and how I could get a job. And anything about school.
I check my phone now. The more I think about this, the more I think it could be anyone. But the past is awake. I knew that this would happen if I connected with my mother.
I finally go to bed. It’s perp counselling tomorrow and the final funding meeting on Thursday. No matter what happens to me, I still need to step up for SafeMe. I have to find a way to separate this from my life and my work. I get up and look in on my kids. Jennifer is rosy-cheeked and sleeping outside the covers as usual. Her room is messy like my childhood room and she truly is mini me. Simon is tidy and, Vi tells me, a mini Danny. Or Danny Jnr Jnr, as they like to joke. His room is spotless and his clothes hung up. His many certificates are pinned in lines on the wall by his bed. Long-limbed and curly-haired, he even lies straight like Danny does.
My heart bursts with love for the pair of them. I push down the fear I felt earlier in case it seeps out of me and into them – Jennifer is already playing up and I wonder if it is my erratic mood that is getting to her. I hardly remember a time when I didn’t have these two to care for. The time between leaving home and giving birth is a faded memory punctuated with meeting Danny and the times we became closer.
I can’t imagine life without them. Any of them. I have to find a way to straighten this out. I go through all the options again but I am helpless as it goes on and on. My mind races into anxiety, towards another sleepless night worrying about Danny and the kids. Worrying about Dougie Peters, wondering what happened after I left. After she left. But what’s the use? No one believed me then and no one will believe me now.
Tanya
Diary Entry: Sunday
I spent all day searching for something I could use as a weapon. I’m almost laughing as I write this. It seems so unbelievable. I haven’t showered and I haven’t brushed my hair. My face is still swollen. It’s turned blue now and I know that in three days it will turn a light green, then yellow, then disappear. Except I will still feel it every time he comes near me.
The house seems huge without him here and I roamed around the rooms, opening drawers and looking in cupboards. I need something heavy. It would need to be a complete surprise — I would wait behind the door for when he comes in then hit him over the head. I almost pass out at the thought of it.
A knife would be useless, I might not kill him and he would have time to get me. This way the door would be open and he would be unconscious. I wavered all day between deciding that this wouldn’t work to standing behind the door on the footstool from the lounge. I held a sponge in place of the heavy object I was yet to find.
About six o’clock I began to panic. My whole plan rested on doing this right. I didn’t really want to kill him or even hurt him; I just want to get away. I thought if I didn’t do this now, I would never do it. I knew he would not be happy about what I said just before he left. And from previous experience he would be even more furious after having had time away to think about it.
But didn’t this make me as bad as him? I don’t want to hurt anyone. Even as a young teenager I liked kittens and I made sure spiders and stray bees trapped in the house made their way back outside. I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t left with him. The searing pain of my father and what he must have gone through when he found me gone pierces me.
And how he must have died alone, in pain. It is this that stops me thinking back, thinking how stupid I was and how many people I must have hurt.
But I have to now. I have to face what really happened if I am to get out of here. I told myself, and still do sometimes, when things are really bad, that he loves me. That he did then and he does now. That I chose to leave and cut off everything that I knew.
I was fifteen. Nearly sixteen. It was all drama. All boys and clothes and falling out with friends. But I had Alan. I met him at the local teen disco, which, now I know how much older than me he actually is, seems strange. We all fancied him. He had a car and cigarettes. He was very cool. He made a beeline for us and I prayed that it was me and not her he liked, even then. Even right at the beginning.
She was protective of me. She would screen potential boyfriends and write down the pros and cons in two columns in blue Biro. The night she stood in front of me, slightly to one side, and watched as he asked me to dance. I made a ‘squee’ face and flicked my ponytail. Although we had played together as children and, even though we had gone to different junior schools, hung out in the holidays and after school, we were very different.
Ria kept up with fashion. She dyed her hair at fourteen and bought the latest jeans. She loved Manchester music. I had kept my blonde hair long and wore it in a tight ponytail. The only thing I looked good in was jeans and a T-shirt. I was too skinny for fashion. All the boys loved Ria. Her thick mascara and her short skirts. Me, not so much. But Alan did.
As he took over my life she dropped back, going out with Kim and Linda. But I would feel her eyes on me as I got in Alan’s car. We lived four doors apart and she was always watching. She was always staring at us. I thought she was staring at him but I’m starting to realise that it was me she was watching. She was scared for me.
Around teatime I opened the freezer and reached right to the back. I kept a tub of Häagen-Dazs ice cream for special occasions when I would be allowed a desert. Alan does not eat desert. He doesn’t like sweet things. So, by default, neither do I. I ate the full tub. I felt a little bit sick, but I held the ice-cold container against my face and it made me feel better about it. I pulled out a big bag of frozen peas and held them between my legs.
This time tomorrow I would have carried out my plan. This will be my last diary entry because I will be either dead or free.
Chapter Twenty-one
Day 9
I’m caught. Every thought is preceded by a ‘what if?’ and I am stifled in my own life. I sit in our tiny flat with my beautiful children and all I can think about is the fucked-up game that someone is playing that makes no sense.
I am used to it. I speak at conferences all over the country about domestic violence, gaslighting and abuse. I know what the enduring questions are. Close behind ‘why didn’t she leave?’, which is entirely explainable in practical and psychological terms, is ‘why did he do it’, which inevitably leads to ‘and how can we stop it?’.
So the angry buzzing in my soul is asking the very same things. Why would one human being do this to another human being? And why is he doing this now? These questions, I realise only too well, form the basis of any complaint I could make. The police and legal services work on logic – cause and effect. To them, he is an unknown. Unpleasant, but unknown.
But to me, like anyone who has had long-term contact with a bully or abuser, he has steadily built up a regime of fear and blocked any means of complaint. Probably reasonable and approachable on the outside, they do their worst in secret and promise more of the same if you tell. I know for sure that to most people it is difficult to believe, especially if the person is plausible.
I chose well with Danny – beautiful, kind Danny, who I know would never hurt me or anyone else. Yet here I am, embroiled in a situation where all this hurt is happening to me. I am trying to think it through, to see where I can push through and get someone to believe me, to find a way to trip up whoever is taunting me and make people see what he is doing. Because I know that, like all abusers, when he is cornered he will deny everything. He will tell them it is my fault, that I led him on, that I am a psychotic liar.
Jim stood there, about to batter Sally with a blunt instrument, and he was still blaming her. Look what you made me do. Frank, blaming Sheila for Bobby, while he did the worst thing he could do second to hitting her – he had a child with someone else. Dougie, insisting for years that someone was responsible for Alice’s death, accusing anyone on the basis of some thin theory, when in reality she had left.
Why? Why did they do it? Why is he doing this? The answer is this: because they can. The very fact that it is not logical, not what you would expect, disproportionate, is how they are able to get away with it. Because when I come to pull the story together, to explain it, even to myself, it sounds like some hugely exaggerated made-up story with little evidence. It did happen. It did.
I drop off my children, waving and smiling, but immediately scanning the landscape for a red car. He is not there. I haven’t heard from him all weekend. Why is he doing this? I ask myself for the millionth time. But I know the answer. Because men like him do what they want, regardless of the consequences.
Yes, this is the inside of my mind on my way to work. Wondering how someone else’s mind works, which is always a losing battle. As I approach SafeMe and see the men who are here for perpetrator counselling standing outside the gates, not looking at each other, I wonder if I am in the right state of mind for this. But it’s too late: Malc has seen me and he throws open the gate. The guys walk towards the yard, carefully avoiding me and each other, as if they were here by accident.
Once inside, I help Janice set up. She’s on good form, packing the women off to the accommodation block while the meeting is in progress. She’s sweeping the floor and dragging the tiny chairs into a circle while I sort through the register and notes.
‘See Sheila in the paper? What do you think?’
I nod. She knows I’m attached to Sheila.
‘Not good. But there’s more to it. Bloody Frank. He’s clever.’
She shakes her head and does her best Don Corleone. ‘Frankie, Frankie, Frankie.’ We both laugh and it feels good. I feel like I haven’t laughed for a long time.
‘So do you think he’ll turn up today?’
‘Yeah. He’ll be here, sticking his beak in till he gets his own way. Gave all the flats widescreen TVs.’
She snorts. ‘Yeah, I heard. Not good while funding’s looking at us. Not without donation forms.’
I produce some donation forms on cue.
‘Well, if he does turn up today, I’ll get him to fill them in. And for the Xboxes.’
She sweeps and I sort. Finally she brings up the subject we’re both nervous about.
‘So funding meeting. Thursday. We need a Plan B. What if we don’t get it?’
We both look around at the main room. We’ve seen so many things, so many people, so many lives turned around. So many lives lost. I can’t imagine my life without SafeMe. Worse, there will be no provision for the women. Or for the perps. I feel tears prick my eyes.
‘I don’t know, Jan. Let’s cross that fucking massive bridge when we come to it.’
We’re ready. I signal to Malc to open the doors and the men flow in, rushing to the seats furthest away from the front. There are a few new faces and I recognise Amanda Perry’s husband, Tony, back again. I’d heard she was back in hospital and her children in foster care. She went back because they couldn’t rehouse her with her four children. Six months ago, in this very room, Tony swore on his children’s lives that he would never hit Amanda again. Turns out his children’s lives don’t mean that much to him.
I glance out of the window and see the black limo. The rising anger inside me takes me by surprise. Frank, fresh from his outing with his mistress and his daughter to teach Sheila a lesson, has shown up. He emerges and two guys, different from last time, follow him with boxes. Malc opens the door and Frank is standing in front of me. He mo
tions at the boxes.
‘Electric blankets.’ His eyes meet mine and he is mocking me. He leans forwards slightly. ‘For the children.’
I don’t flinch. Not even a raised eyebrow. I won’t give him the satisfaction. Janice hurries over.
‘Ooo. More donations. That’s very kind of you, Frank.’ Her tone says ‘uncharacteristically kind’. She hands him the donation forms. ‘If you could just fill these in. So our funders know where these have come from. And the TVs and the Xboxes.’
He passes the forms and pen to his accomplice, who moves to a table and begins to fill them in.
‘So, ladies, what’s on the agenda today?’
Janice touches his arm and his other minder steps forwards. He smiles.
‘OK, boys, you can wait in the car. Frankie’s safe here.’
He sits at the back, looking at his phone, as Janice goes through the motions with the perpetrators. One of the guys is truly sorry and in floods of tears and Frank looks up, disgusted. There is a long debate about dealing with jealousy and flashpoints, and Janice hands out some sheets which detail alternatives to violence. The session ends and the men rush to the front to get their attendance cards stamped. This is so that either their probation officer or their social worker will approve. Then they leave. Except for Frank. He waits, scrolling his phone, until the last perpetrator has left, and then he looks up.
‘Ria, may I have a word?’
Polite as anything, yet my hackles rise. I don’t have a choice, really. It’s part of the perpetrator service.
‘Of course, Frank. What is it?’
He looks around. His lazy gaze rests on the CCTV camera that points both towards the exit and into the room.
‘In private? It’s about Sheila.’
I look at Janice, who is moving the chairs back.
‘OK. In my office. Is that all right?’
He follows me into the small room, where he can intimidate me better, and we assume last week’s position. I watch as he checks for CCTV cameras. He’s wasting his time, because the cameras in here are webcams, activated by the switch under the desk. He seems satisfied and sits, one leg pulled up over the other, opposite me.
How to Play Dead Page 19