by Sarah Hilary
The cellar’s smell rose to greet her, turned earth and bricks cracked by damp. The drop in pressure made her ears pop, as if she’d ducked underwater. Shadows crawled to the walls. Two, three steps down into the darkness, broken by a single bulb swinging on a frayed flex above the pit where Ruth was sitting with her lap full of sketches, the green leather album abandoned at her side. ‘Is she safe?’ she asked.
‘Natalie? Yes.’
‘I gave her the envelope and pencil.’ She bent her fair head over her lap. ‘She was drawing at the house on the estate, I could see she liked drawing. The place was full of her pictures.’
Marnie didn’t speak straightaway. Then she said, ‘Her home, yes.’
The cellar swallowed any echo which might have attached itself to their voices. Like the rest of the house it had been emptied ahead of the sale. Where was the furniture? The beds Michael and Alyson had slept in, the table around which they’d eaten their meals, books they’d read, trinkets they’d collected – where did it all go? To a house clearance, or into storage. Marnie had been in derelict houses, and houses razed by fire. This was different, like standing inside a tunnel. Her eyes struggled to adjust to the dimness. Ruth looked small, sitting there.
‘I don’t know why I took her,’ she said. ‘I wanted to see Julie, but she was at work. She’s always at work. Natalie looked bored, and lonely.’
‘She was safe. She was with her grandmother. Julie has to work, to pay the bills.’
‘You think this is class war?’ A thread of her old hostility, muted now. ‘I do understand how people live, DI Rome. I’m not stupid.’
‘No,’ Marnie agreed. ‘That’s what makes this so much worse.’
She moved to sit on the second step, her feet on the cellar floor. The door stayed open at the top of the steps behind her, where Toby and his team were standing by. They’d offered to handle the rest of this, after Marnie had taken Natalie out of the house. Toby had offered to make the arrest and secure the scene, and she’d been tempted because Ruth revolted her on so many levels. But this was her job. She remembered what she’d said to Lorna Ferguson at the outset of the case, that Ruth and Lara were victims too. Seeing her now, seated beside the hole she’d dug so tidily in his cellar floor, her lap full of his sketches, Marnie wanted to feel pity for Ruth. She really did.
‘I didn’t hurt her,’ Ruth said. ‘And I let you take her without a fight. That should go in my favour, shouldn’t it?’ She looked up at last, the sheen of tears in her eyes. ‘That I let you take her.’
Marnie had distrusted her capitulation when Ruth, standing at the upstairs window, had said Michael was prey. It was Toby who’d decided the crisis was over and it was safe to send a team into the house to search for Natalie; Toby who had cautioned Ruth.
‘I was in his bedroom,’ she said. ‘That’s where it hit me. He’s gone. The house is so empty, as if he were never here.’ She folded her hands over the sketches in her lap. ‘It’s over, I can feel it.’
‘Over in what way? What do you believe has happened to Michael?’
‘He’s passed.’ She bowed her head. ‘The house. Everything. It feels finished.’
Toby could have taken her out of here, but it would have required force. Marnie hadn’t wanted Natalie to witness that. ‘How did he pass? Do you know?’
‘He was tricked into running.’ Ruth pushed her hands into the pile of sketches, until all her fingers were hidden. ‘He would have been here waiting for me if he was safe.’ She swung her feet down into the open grave as if she were sitting at the side of a pool and wanted her feet in the water. ‘He would have come.’
‘Tricked by whom?’
‘Whoever helped him to escape. He’d never have risked running unless someone provoked him, or convinced him it was worth the risk.’
Noah had passed on the accusations Darren Quayle had made back at the station, the new reasons they had to doubt that Vokey was alive.
‘The first time we spoke, you said Michael was afraid of Edwards Elms, his cellmate.’
‘It wasn’t him.’ Ruth made a gesture of dismissal. ‘He had scissors in the cell. If he’d wanted to kill Michael, he’d have done it then and there. No, it was someone else. Someone who wanted him out of there, free. Except he wasn’t.’ She picked one of the sketches from her lap and dropped it into the pit at her feet, the paper floating for a second on the cellar’s sour air. ‘He drew her. Julie. He sent me one of the drawings. He made her look so special, strong. An earth mother. That was the picture I took out of the album, the one you suspected was obscene. It was the only time he ever lied, making her look like that, like his favourite.’
Her face was dark with jealousy. Why had Michael sent her the drawing of Julie? To torment Ruth, or to tie her more closely to him by the burr of envy?
Marnie’s shirt was sticking to her skin. The cellar air was solid, charged. She reached a hand to touch the spot where Natalie’s cheek had pressed against hers. ‘He told you to dig this pit. What else did he tell you to do?’
‘To help him start over.’ Ruth bent at the waist to unbuckle her shoes. ‘He wanted to start over.’ She pushed the ugly shoes from her feet, dropping them down into the grave, two dull thuds one after the other. Then she drove the sketches from her lap with both hands, a mad fluttering, so that her feet were obscured for a moment by falling paper. ‘Isn’t that what everyone wants, to start over?’ One of the sketches clung to the arch of her foot until she kicked it free, sending it down into the pit with the others. She lifted her eyes to Marnie. ‘Isn’t it what you want?’
46
The light had gone out of the day by the time Marnie reached the hospital, making mirrors of all its many windows. Ted Elms was breathing with the aid of a machine, his chest rising and falling to its rhythm, too precise to be natural. Was he dreaming? Or were his dreams like his lungs, beyond his help now, made possible only with the aid of a machine?
She stood at the foot of his bed, thinking of everything he’d done. Forgery: instructions to Ruth, and reasons for Vokey to feel sure of a safe hiding place when he ran. Misdirection: the grave, and Lara’s letters luring them away from London, allowing them to believe in a conspiracy against Alyson. Whatever role Ted had played in Darren’s enslavement, and his revenge. The carnage in that corridor. Fire and smoke and savagery. This was the price Ted had paid, the machine breathing for him as the rest of his body slowly shut down. Had it been worth it? He must have hated Michael Vokey, needing to punish him in ways the system could not. Hating the police and the prosecutors, everyone who had judged him a fraud when he was buckled under the weight of loss, struggling to come to terms with his mother’s death. His hands were outside the sheets, one white finger pinched by a heart monitor. Both hands looked clean, pale and smooth, making it hard to imagine the harm he’d done, all the ways in which he’d dealt vengeance to his tormentors.
Marnie left him and walked to the far end of the corridor, hesitating before she turned right towards the private room, guarded like Ted’s. In here too the patient was wired to machines, his face obscured by an oxygen mask, an improvement on six days ago when Stephen had been on a ventilator. Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome, ARDS, triggered by the inhalation of burning smoke. He’d been unconscious since they’d brought him here on the night of the riot, eyelashes clinging wetly to his cheeks, breath clouding inside the mask. From where she stood inside the door to his room, Marnie could see the dark line of his collarbone, a fist-sized bruise on his shoulder. He looked smaller than he had the last time she’d seen him. Smaller than he had looked in years. She watched him, hypnotised by the damp pattern of his breathing, the way the mask clouded and cleared. Clouded. And cleared.
‘DI Rome?’ A woman was standing under the shelter of the hospital’s main entrance in a pale belted raincoat, holding a yellow leather handbag under her arm. Her shoulder-length hair was shot through with expensive highlights that trapped the hard light and gave it back as rosy bronze and gold. Six years ago s
he’d worn her hair short and bottle blonde, but Marnie recognised her from the pictures taken at her parents’ house, seated on the sofa next to her teenage son. Stephen’s mother, Stella Keele.
‘It is DI Rome, isn’t it?’ Stella tried a smile but it didn’t fit on her face, restricted by whatever fillers went with the highlights. ‘I recognise you from the pictures. In the papers, I mean.’ She’d squeezed the accent from her voice, the way she’d squeezed her feet into leopard-print kitten heels. ‘I want to see him.’ She stepped closer, clutching the glossy bag. ‘May I see him?’
‘You should speak to the doctors.’
‘I did.’ Another step closer. ‘If he were conscious, he’d need to give his permission. But I’m his mum and he’s seriously ill, on a ventilator. Surely I should be allowed—’ She broke off, flinching from whatever expression was on Marnie’s face.
‘I’m sorry, I can’t help you.’ Marnie turned and walked away, towards the place where her car was parked. Goosebumps on her neck, the skin hot at her wrists where a pulse pricked and stabbed, every cell in her body wanting her away from this woman.
‘Please, I just want to see him!’ The kitten heels flinted behind her.
Don’t turn. Walk away.
‘He’s my son!’
The son you abused, damaging him so deeply he turned into a killer. He’s in that hospital because of you. My parents are in the ground because of you.
‘I know you can’t forgive him, but I can. That’s what he needs. Forgiveness.’
Keep walking. Walk away.
‘Your parents understood that! I was grateful to them, I am grateful. For bringing us back together. They tried to help, they allowed me to see him.’
‘And he killed them for it.’ Marnie turned to face the woman. ‘Because they judged it a good idea to bring you back into his life. You haven’t the right to forgive anyone, certainly not the son you abused.’
‘That’s unfair.’ Her eyelids twinged. ‘I’ve changed. You can see that.’
‘I see an expensive handbag and a lot of brickwork.’ She nodded at the woman’s immobile face. ‘But if you’re talking about forgiving him, you clearly haven’t changed at all.’
‘You don’t know me.’ She straightened, an inch taller than Marnie in her heels. ‘You don’t know what I went through. I tried to warn your parents what he was.’
‘He was a child. Eight years old.’
‘He was a monster—!’ She glanced away, her eyes wild. ‘He could be a monster. Surely you can believe that, after everything he did. I had eight years of him.’ She dropped her head, highlights swaying. ‘I hoped I’d find him changed after their care, I really hoped they could do that. Because I took some wrong paths, I’m not saying it isn’t partly on me. I’m his mother, but it’s not as simple as everyone makes out.’
‘You didn’t torture him, make him stand in the snow barefoot? You didn’t write on his body?’
‘What? No! No.’ She swept the hair from her shoulders with one manicured hand. ‘No.’
Aidan Duffy had told Marnie about the snow, and the words. Obscenities, he’d said, finger-painted all over Stephen while he was still a toddler. By both parents.
Stella stood tall in her heels, eyebrows plucked, lips plumped, the whole of her fixed and faked, nothing left to nature or chance. It was impossible to read her frozen face. Was that why she’d invested in the surgery, a glacial fortress for her lies?
‘Where’s your husband?’ Marnie asked her. ‘Why isn’t he here?’
Stella’s eyes shifted to her left. ‘Theo doesn’t— We separated.’
The pair of them painting words on Stephen’s body in places he couldn’t see, words he couldn’t read. That picture, indelible, had been in Marnie’s head since Aidan told her about it. Now Stella was saying it wasn’t true. That Stephen had been born bad, a monster.
‘I haven’t seen him in a long time,’ she said. ‘And prison changes you. I know that.’
Meaning what? That Stephen might have been made less abominable by the years he’d spent behind bars? Didn’t she know what had happened to her son in juvenile detention? Attacked by a gang of girls, brutalised, put into hospital. Then Cloverton, an adult prison with the worst possible reputation for violence and self-harm. Prison changes you. Ruth Hull had argued the same case for Michael Vokey and look where it had got her: charged with child kidnap, unable to see any truth or hope or future through the fog of her delusion.
‘I can’t help you.’ Marnie stripped the emotion from her voice. ‘Other than to say I doubt he’d want to see you if he were conscious. He refused your visitor requests at the prison, didn’t he?’
‘This is different. He’s on a ventilator! He could die.’
The woman’s perfume coloured the air between them, a bruised purplish-blue.
‘Speak to the doctors.’
‘I’m sorry.’ As if Marnie had dragged the word out of her. ‘Is that what you need to hear? I’m sorry. For what my son did to you, to your parents. I am.’
‘Just not sorry for the part you played in it. Good, well that’s clear.’ Marnie took out her car keys, fitting them into her fist the way she did when she was walking up an empty street after dark.
‘I hoped he’d changed,’ Stella insisted. ‘I thought they might have been able to do that. They understood. The way they spoke to me, to the pair of us— They were good people.’
‘And now they’re gone.’
Because they brought you back into his life, forced him to sit beside you on their sofa eating biscuits. Perhaps he had changed until that moment tipped him over the edge, discovering his new family had betrayed him. They wanted redemption for Stephen, for the pair of you, and it cost them their lives. I need to stop this, before it does the same to me.
‘You think this’s easy for me just because you’ve been able to move on?’ Stella swept a hand from Marnie’s feet to her face. ‘You don’t have a son you haven’t seen in over ten years!’
‘You’re right. It’s easy for me. Goodnight.’
She turned her back, not speaking even when Stella called after her, ‘If he dies without forgiveness, that’ll be on you! He’ll go to Hell and it’ll be on you!’
Had she found religion, or was she simply shouting platitudes? Religion would be a further layer to her armour. She was a narcissist, needing to protect her version of the truth at all costs. Under the expensive makeover, she was just another narcissist.
‘Prison changes you!’ she shouted as Marnie got into the car. ‘Your house was like a prison, that’s what he told me! Your parents’ house was a prison!’
It had been Marnie’s line when she was an angry teenager, slamming in and out of her family’s life, hating their house with a passion when now she’d give anything for the chance to be back there, holding them, thanking them for their patience and optimism, their faith in her.
‘I have a right to see him!’ There was the start of a bark in Stella’s voice now, pitched high enough to reach Marnie when she was inside the car, firing the engine. ‘At the end of the day, I’m his mother, I have rights. If he’s dying, I have rights!’
She was in the rear-view mirror, her face shining with outrage and anger. ‘You don’t have a son you haven’t seen in years! You don’t even have a brother!’
‘I have a brother,’ Marnie said under her breath. ‘I made that promise to them ten years ago. All you’ve done is make me want to keep it.’
In the car’s mirrors, smoke was rising from the hospital incinerators in thin grey fingers. In a room on the third floor, Stephen was lying in a narrow bed, his lungs blackened, poisoned. He might never regain consciousness, Stella was right about that. He might die tonight, or tomorrow, this damaged boy her parents had wanted for her brother.
She met her own eyes in the darkened windscreen. ‘I made a promise.’
Stella Keele dwindled to a stick figure in the mirrors as Marnie swung out of the car park, back into the long snarl of London’s night traf
fic.
47
The next day brought clouds the colour of tin cans, a storm trapped inside the sunshine that lit the station with infrequent flashes of white. By late afternoon, the sky was shaking with thunder and oppressively dry, not even the scent of rain to soften the storm’s electricity.
‘African violet.’ Harry put the plant pot on the edge of Marnie’s desk. ‘To say thanks for the other night.’ He straightened, scratching at his eyebrow. ‘Mum says thanks too.’
‘How is she?’
‘In hospital still.’ Harry had swapped the bandage on his hand for a plaster. ‘She’s much better there, for now at least.’
‘I’m glad.’ Marnie turned the violet towards the light, its petals a deep velvety blue. ‘This is lovely, thank you.’
‘It’s the one from Mum’s kitchen. Not because I’m a cheapskate, but because I didn’t want it die, which it will if I’m left in charge of watering it.’ He frowned, not quite seriously but as if he regretted what he’d just said. ‘Obviously, with all the time you have on your hands, I thought you’d jump at the chance to be in charge of that.’ Crooking his mouth in apology.
Marnie smiled at him. ‘Have you seen Noah?’
‘I’m about to. I have good news about Sol, no new charges relating to the firearms.’
‘That’s great news. He’ll be glad to hear it.’
A petal fell from the African violet onto Marnie’s desk.
‘It may need watering,’ Harry said ruefully.
‘Leave it with me.’
After he’d gone, she fed the violet a little water, remembering the roses in the house in Harpenden, their apricot scent as Anita crushed the dropped petals between her fingers. Marnie touched the leaves of the violet, its fine hairs prickling her skin, a small friction which she felt in her fingertips even after she took her hand away.