by Sarah Hilary
‘Eight weeks ago,’ her fingers found the creases, smoothing them, ‘Stephen gave me an answer to the question I’ve been asking him for the last six years.’
Noah didn’t need to ask which question. He watched her face, every flicker, every pulse. She was hesitating, reluctant to share whatever secrets were inside the paper wallet. The answers she’d been seeking, why Stephen killed her parents after they gave him a home, a sister.
‘He said he did it because they broke their promises to him, and to Children’s Services. They made him meet with his birth mother, the woman who abused him for the first eight years of his life. Stella Keele. She’s the reason he was in care.’ Marnie held the wallet as delicately as if it were an injured bird, or a letter bomb. ‘He told me they brought Stella into their house and made Stephen sit next to her on the sofa, drinking tea and eating biscuits. I told him I didn’t believe him.’ She stroked her thumb at the smiling images on the wallet. ‘He said the evidence was in here. Pictures taken on my dad’s camera, the last pictures he took. Stephen hid the camera, but Harry found it after the break-in at my house.’ She reached out, putting the wallet of photos into Noah’s hand. ‘Stephen said if I developed the film, I’d see the truth for myself. What they did to make him murder them.’
The blue paper was cool under Noah’s fingers.
‘He dared me to look.’ Marnie moved precisely, placing her wrists at the lip of the table, summoning a symmetry which was ruined by the messy spill of pain from her eyes. ‘Go on, it’s okay. Not what you might be thinking. Just photos.’
Noah opened the wallet, taking the content by its edges. Glossy prints, their colours intense, details sharp. A garden with a swing, the grass an unearthly green. A gravel driveway where a newly washed car was sparkling in the sun. The yellow sofa where a boy sat, his face and body rigid, eyes scribbled black by fear. In a chair with a red cushion, a blonde woman smiled easily for the camera. Another of the two together on the sofa – the woman and the boy – their likeness seated between them like a ghost. Stephen held a glass of squash, the light falling into it as fire, his fingers white around it, a plate of biscuits balanced on his knees. In the photos he looked about ten, but he was older. Fourteen, the age at which he’d killed Marnie’s parents. They didn’t appear in any of the photographs, Marnie’s father behind the camera, her mother out of shot. Noah turned to another print of the garden, Stella Keele with her arm around Stephen’s shoulders, his expression beyond terror, towards anger now.
‘That’s why he killed them,’ Marnie said softly. ‘Because they brought her back into his life. They were meant to be keeping him safe from her, but instead they did this.’ She moved her hand, its fingers thin and white. ‘He wants me to believe it was a form of self-defence, or revenge. Not motiveless or senseless. This is why he did it. Because they were arrogant enough to think they could reconcile him with his abuser and— It’s as if I’ve lost them all over again.’ Shadows fractured her face. ‘Six years ago it was their deaths, the violence of their deaths, but now it feels as if I never knew them at all.’
With these photographs, Stephen had robbed her of any hope of happy memories, making her an orphan for a second time. Noah, who was trying to keep his family together, felt her pain reach under his ribs, its fingers scrabbling for purchase in his chest.
‘And then there’s this.’ Marnie took the photos from his hand, separating three from the rest of the set. ‘Here. And here.’ Pointing to a detail in each one. ‘And here.’
All three photos had been taken outside the house with the street visible in the background. In the first photo, of the car sparkling in the driveway, a man stood under the trees across the street from Marnie’s house. In a baseball cap and dark jacket, fists in the pockets of his jeans. The same man was in the second and third photos, the cap shielding his face from the camera. His body language rang alarm bells in Noah’s head. A watcher. He was watching the house. ‘Who is he?’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Marnie reached for the bottle of water. ‘There was never anyone else. No strangers in the vicinity, no reports from the neighbours. It was always just Stephen, we never looked for anyone else.’
‘He confessed, didn’t he?’
‘He said nothing, in fact. When the police got there he was sitting on the stairs covered in their blood and with injuries consistent with having used the knife, repeatedly.’
‘He’d have denied it. If it wasn’t him. Surely? All this time . . .’ Baiting her, bringing her back to the prison again and again, promising to tell her the secret of why he did it, keeping her close, never letting her go. ‘He wouldn’t have taken the blame unless he did it.’
‘Perhaps he believes he did it. Or he did it. Probably he did it.’ But there was a slice of doubt in her voice, in her head. The photos had put it there and she hadn’t been able to let it go.
‘Did he know you’d see this man in these photos?’ Noah asked. ‘Did he say anything about anyone else at the house, someone your dad might’ve photographed?’
‘Just his mother, Stella.’
‘What about Stephen’s father?’
‘Theo Keele? It could be him.’ Marnie’s tone said she’d considered this possibility. ‘Perhaps he gave his wife a lift that day, but didn’t come into the house. I’ve no way of knowing.’
‘Did your dad know, d’you think? Did he see this man when he was taking the photos?’
‘If he did, he said nothing about it. No reports to the police, nothing on record.’ Marnie’s face was open, laid bare for his scrutiny. ‘I don’t know, Noah. I may be going mad. Why would I even want to believe in Stephen’s innocence after all this time, all the evidence he’s a psychopath, invested in my pain?’ She drew a breath, reaching for the photo of Stephen with his mother. ‘When I first looked at these, my worst thought was, Why didn’t you kill her? Why did it have to be them? That was bad enough, wishing her dead. Then I became angry with them for putting themselves in danger and for what? To have him hug it out with the woman who’d screwed him up so horribly in the first place? I couldn’t stop staring at the photos, every detail. That’s when I spotted the lurker and it was – relief. I was relieved at the idea of someone else being there. Not just the three of them getting smaller and smaller in that house, suffocating.’
Noah thought fleetingly of his parents’ house after he’d left home. Mum and Dad learning to live with Sol’s excesses. But he could access the happy memories easily enough, nothing had happened to destroy that. The past was always tricky to navigate. For Marnie, it was treacherous.
‘I want to believe there was someone else, but why?’ She shook her head. ‘To make my peace with Stephen because he’s so ill? Or to keep this quest alive? I don’t know who I am if I’m not hunting for answers about their deaths. It’s been my life for so long, I’m afraid of the person I’ll be if I stop. I’ve made it so much a part of me, an obsession, the same as Lara and Ruth. I’ll be lost without it. If he dies and I don’t have answers, I’ll be lost.’
She marshalled a smile before Noah could speak. ‘Sorry, I’m offloading and we have work to do, but I became a detective to get away from that house. Stephen knows it, he knows how unhappy I was there, with them. I’ve never admitted it to anyone, but he knew.’
Stephen murdered her parents, Noah was sure of it. The pleasure he’d taken in torturing her ever since hadn’t come from thin air. Stephen was a psychopath. And he kept finding new ways to hurt her, this fresh doubt being the latest. Noah reached for her hand and held it.
‘I know it’s madness,’ she said quietly. ‘I do know that. He killed them, and he didn’t have a good reason, it wasn’t self-defence. They never meant to hurt him, or frighten him. They thought they were doing the right thing and it was wrong, you and I can see that, but it wasn’t cruel. They did their best, just as they did with me. They weren’t perfect, but why should they have been?’ She gripped Noah’s hand, attempting a proper smile. ‘I just need to find them again, that’s all. I�
�ve been so obsessed with their deaths I’ve forgotten who they were. I could tell you the exact pattern of the entry wounds on their bodies, their handprints in the kitchen. That’s what I see when I shut my eyes, bloody handprints and evidence bags. I don’t see living, flawed people. This is what I need to sort out. Not what Stephen did or didn’t do, or why. They haven’t been human to me for a long time. I need them to be human again.’
She retrieved the wallet of photos, returning it to her bag. ‘But it made me think,’ nodding at the room, ‘photos can be weapons. Photos can lie—’
She stepped up to the wall of faces, closing in on the black and white ones. ‘Szondi’s test. It reminds me of mirrors, the way a camera inverts every image.’ She touched a hand to her left hip. ‘What if we’re seeing everything back to front? Michael, and those women. I can’t see him; that’s never happened to me before. Even when I can’t solve a puzzle I can usually see its pieces. But he’s invisible. Smoke, like Aidan said. I can’t get a grip on him.’ She glanced across at Noah, a frown shadowing her eyes. ‘We’re used to being a step behind at the start of an investigation. Those first few days are all about catching up, but I don’t feel we’re on the same road as him. Even now, after nearly two weeks. Something’s wrong, more than the riot and the fire and the escape. I told myself it was because Stephen was one of his victims but that’s too easy.’ She set her hand on one of the unidentified faces. ‘I recognise these women, their emptiness. The urge to fill it with something, someone. I understood Lara, even before she started to tell me her truth. It’s Michael who makes no sense to me. Why didn’t he run to one of them? Lara, or Ruth, or Alyson. They look like Alyson, have you noticed? Ruth and Lara, big and blonde like his sister. He needs these women. This isn’t someone who can survive on his own. He needs company, and he needs routine. Look how he worked on the men in Leeds, a ready-made audience. When he ran from Cloverton, he must have had someone to run to—’
Noah’s phone buzzed and he answered it with a look of apology for Marnie. ‘DS Jake.’
‘The nine-millimetre Baikal.’ It was Harry Kennedy. ‘We did some digging. It’s part of a batch sold out of Luton last year. A couple of convictions came off the back of it. One of those we convicted ended up in Leeds. Sharing a cell with guess who.’
Noah met Marnie’s eyes, his grip tightening on the phone. ‘Michael Vokey?’
‘The same. I’ve got the cellmate’s name,’ Harry said. ‘But you may already know it. Charlie Lamb. He told the court he had the gun for his own protection, for his family’s sake. Well, who knows? But he’s deceased. He died in the prison, a suicide. Vokey was given counselling, because he was sharing a cell with Charlie at the time. Something tells me you’ll want to look into that.’
35
I wanted to spare you the sordid details, but it’s too late for that. My fingers and toes won’t stop twitching because my liver’s packing up, that’s what I heard the doctor telling my lucky nurse. I’m blue, like bad bacon. Hot then cold, my heart beating so fast I can see it under the hospital gown, under the tubes and blankets. Everything hurts, even sleeping. I can’t hold onto a thought that makes sense for longer than a nanosecond. I’m on the blink, every bit of me misfiring. Broken, inside and out. Mickey did that, in case there’s any doubt. Came at me through the smoke like a steam train. I never imagined he could move so fast, or that he’d want to. I ran, but he took me down and kept me down with his fists and feet, packing a year’s worth of exertion into those few frantic minutes when he was killing me.
You might not believe me, of course. I know how the truth sounds coming from the likes of me. A convict, a criminal. I spent too much time around Mickey and Aidan and the others. Too much time inhabiting the fantasy worlds of Lara and Ruth, inventing stories to fill their sad lives. If I went too far, I’m sorry. My nurse says I’m okay, but the doctors don’t agree. I’ve problems with breathing and processing, with my liver and heart and kidneys. Now they’re saying hallucinations, delusions. I never said I was the perfect witness, but I’m doing my best because I’m the only one who saw it all unfold the way it did. I have to do my best, don’t I? However much I’d rather lie here counting the minutes until the next shot, until my nurse washes me with sponges in the gentle way she has, the crucifix swinging at her throat so that if I could only just unfurl my fingers and lift my hand, if I could get my arm off the bed and reach—
I’d have it, the crucifix. I’d have it in my fist and then I could pull her close, enough for her to hear the thoughts inside my skull, battering to get out, all the places I’m trying so hard to tell the truth about what happened.
‘Listen,’ I’d say. ‘I’ll tell you how it went. Like this—’
Dazza doesn’t know. He thinks he does, reckons he’s the world expert on Michael Vokey because he spent so long shining his shoes with his spit. He knows nothing. Mickey used to mock him late at night. He’d be reading Lara’s letters, and he’d swing his voice straight into Dazza’s, ‘You’ve got mail, Michael! Nice fat ones today. Photos, I’ll bet. Lucky bastard, wish I had some bored cow flashing her tits in my direction.’ Then he’d swing his voice again, pretending to be Dazza’s mum because Dazza had told him all about her, ‘Be a big boy, Darren, you’re a big boy now. No one likes a cry baby. Accidents happen and we clean them up.’
I picture her in a rocking chair with a pile of knitting in her lap, jaw working as she addresses Dazza, laying out her instructions, building him up then breaking him down. That’s how you take charge of people, take control. I’ve known women like that, mothers like that.
Mickey swears it wasn’t the same for him, growing up in a house with a cellar in West London. Not a big house but deep, that’s how I picture it. One of those that runs below street level, where once upon a time the coal was dumped. A deep black throat under the house, sticky with soot where butterflies hibernate, hanging from the anthracite, wings whispering as they sleep.
Ruth didn’t believe in the cellar, until I told her.
‘Dearest Ruth,’ I wrote, ‘I’m worrying again about the house. I try not to, because I know you’re right. Home doesn’t have to be the place you were born. Family doesn’t need to mean a mother and father and a sister who’s moved away, too far to help me now. It means so much to know you’re close by, but the house means a lot too. It’s a place where we can start again, together. You and me. It’s not consecrated but it’s spiritual to me, and I hope to you. A fresh start, that’s what my house means to me now. A chance for us to be together.’
Mickey grunts his approval at my choice of words. He’s the sticky black rock where my butterfly clings, waiting for the spring. I can wait a long time. The grunts turn to snoring and I know he’s asleep, so I keep writing. Words are my weapons, for now.
‘All of my childhood is in the house. I worry how it’s going, the sale and the probate. I can’t imagine never being able to set foot in there again, the only place I’ve ever felt truly safe. It’s worse than ever in here now, I’m afraid to sleep. You can’t imagine what it’s like to have to lie less than three feet from a man who wants you dead. After the scissors, I know he’s serious. I hear his heart beating up there, just above me. All the things he says he wants to do to me, and I know he means it because of what happened the last time he lost his temper. I know he’ll kill me if he can.’
Mickey sleeps on, snoring in the bunk that was mine.
‘Thank you for your last letter.’ My pen is smooth on the page, the envelope addressed and ready for Dazza to smuggle out of here. ‘I read it in secret when he was asleep. If he knew I had a friend like you he’d try to destroy us somehow, twist you against me or stop your letters reaching me. He’d break my fingers if he knew I was drawing you. He hates that we have this, so special and precious and beautiful. What we have is beautiful. You say you’re collecting sheet music, but you are my music. I’m no good with hymns, but I’ve always found church music a comfort. Like you, my dearest. My angel. I want to fill my house, our h
ouse, with your music.’
I thought for a long time before I wrote the next bit. Examined it from every angle, considered all the consequences. I knew I could get the letter out, with Dazza’s help. Mickey wouldn’t want to see it, he never wanted to see the letters I wrote. Even so, I had to consider the consequences. But in the end it came down to this – he’d left me with no choice.
‘If I could find a way for you to get inside the house,’ I wrote, ‘my mother’s house in London, you’d help me, wouldn’t you? Ruth, please. Help me.’
36
‘We made this monster.’ Marnie stood beside the eight images of Cloverton’s escaped prisoner. ‘Michael John Vokey. We heard too many legends and rumours. Somewhere along the line we forgot about hard evidence. So we start over. Everything. Take apart what we know about him, separate it out from what we’ve heard or suspect. Two boards. One with what we’re assuming, the other with the hard facts.’
‘He ran,’ Ron said. ‘That’s a fact.’
‘People run for lots of reasons.’ Noah was watching Marnie, on the alert for signs of stress. Not from the case, which was complex enough. From the photos she’d shared, and the guilt and grief he knew she was fighting. ‘We’ve made a lot of assumptions off the back of his escape.’
‘Then the men he maimed,’ Ron argued. ‘Those two he blinded.’
‘We don’t know he did that,’ Marnie said. ‘We have no evidence, no witnesses.’
It was true. Noah felt a pang of guilt. He’d judged so much about Vokey from his sketches, forgetting to think like a detective as well as a psychologist. There wasn’t much to recommend Michael Vokey to a jury, but did that mean he was a maniac? If so, where was the evidence they needed in order to bring charges?
‘The inmates won’t speak with us because Vokey’s out there.’ Marnie rolled back the cuffs of her shirt. ‘Posing a threat to their loved ones, that’s been our working hypothesis. We haven’t considered the possibility of the threat remaining present, within Cloverton. Yet we know Darren Quayle has a notebook he’s using for the purposes of blackmail.’