The Taken: DI Erica Martin Book 2 (Erica Martin Thriller)

by Alice Clark-Platts

  ‘Everything I need is right here.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. He had swung again, the uncontrolled pendulum of his temper leading him from peace to rage and back again. Now he was quiet, watching her for a change.

  Their eyes were locked. And that was it. One of those easy decisions.

  Sera would give Tristan everything.

  She would make him into the man he was destined to become. And then he would see her, the real her. Then she would be able to see it herself. He would peel her disguise from her like shedding skin until the real person was finally revealed.

  Sera shuddered, coming back to the present as a bell clanged somewhere in the police station. Distant voices, raised in a struggle, an alarm blaring. Someone was fighting against being put in their cage. Sera leaned back on to the cold, white wall, and stared again at her moccasins at the door.

  Fighting was futile.

  60

  ‘I want to talk to you about Michael and Peter, Sera,’ Martin said.

  Tennant stared at Sera darkly from the opposite side of the table, thinking of Jones upstairs in her sling.

  Sera turned to Martin, setting her shoulders as if to meet a task. ‘They were my boys,’ she replied calmly.

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They died.’

  ‘How? How did they die?’

  Sera’s eyes rolled upwards in disinterest. Her shoulders were square but her face was blank. She was heavy in her chair, lumpish.

  ‘Would you like some water, Mrs Snow?’ Tennant asked, unable to hide the acid in his voice.

  Sera didn’t respond.

  ‘How did Michael and Peter die, Sera?’ Martin repeated. ‘I want to hear you tell me. How old were they when they died? Tell me.’

  Sera’s eyelids drooped.

  ‘Sorry, am I keeping you up?’ Martin snapped. ‘The boys. Twins. Two years old. Hit by a truck on a dual carriageway leading out of Blackpool. Ringing any bells? I know, Sera. I know what happened. But I want to hear you say it. I want you to tell me.’

  Sera shook her head in distaste.

  ‘No?’ Martin said, leaning forward. ‘Tell me. Was the killing of your sons an accident?’ she whispered.

  The room hummed in the silence, the tick of Martin’s watch the only tiny sound.

  ‘Do you remember, Detective Inspector?’ Sera said at last, the tips of her fingers feeling along her forehead in a steady rhythm as she bent her head to the table. ‘You said once, that there was no greater crime than murder.’ She looked up, unabashed, at Martin. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Martin answered.

  ‘I disagree with you, though,’ Sera said. ‘I think there are worse things. Evil tentacles which reach around you, shrivel a person and reduce them to something unrecognizable.’

  ‘What things?’ Martin asked, swallowing a little, her mouth dry.

  Sera stared at her, grey curls stuck to her forehead. ‘The destruction of love freely given. The abandonment of a person. When you are given love,’ she said, looking with demanding eyes at Martin, ‘you have a responsibility. You have to nurture it and keep it safe. You can’t just throw it away,’ she chided. ‘If you do, then you deserve to be punished.’

  ‘Tell me about Michael and Peter,’ Martin said again.

  ‘What happened to them meant that they would never be rejected,’ Sera said, at once looking exhausted and haggard, as if this were a position she had defended many thousands of times. ‘They would be with me always. They could never be hurt again. Death was the only thing to wash it away. And at the same time . . . I took them from him.’

  ‘From Tristan?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘I had come to him from my family. I had given him everything. I even abandoned my father for him!’ She laughed, the sound like the clang of metal digging into rock.

  ‘Why was that?’ Martin asked, taking her lead. ‘Why did you subject your father to that humiliation?’

  Sera thought for a moment. She seemed to take on a brittle anger, but it was steeped in self-righteousness, Martin thought, soaked in a horrible self-pity. It was the coat of anger worn by mob-rule, when crowds hurl stones at paediatricians’ windows, believing them to be child abusers. ‘Have you ever known absence, Inspector Martin?’ Sera asked, her mouth pursed. ‘Have you ever known abandonment? My mother abandoned us. I was seven years old. Seven! They say that your emotional life is determined by your mother’s behaviour up until you are seven. So I was unfortunate, wasn’t I?’ She lowered her chin with displeasure. ‘In that. Do you know why she left?’

  Martin knew she wasn’t supposed to answer.

  ‘She went because my father couldn’t have given a toss about her.’ The rage was rearing stronger now, it covered her face, pulling it into a shape of disgust. ‘He bullied her and he bullied us and when she’d had enough, she walked out of that house and she never saw us again. Can you imagine? Can you imagine leaving your children in that way, Inspector? Just leaving them to their own devices like that? I was heartbroken.’ Sera glared at Martin. ‘I could hardly breathe, I was so distraught. I was just a child.’ She lifted her eyes then, as if to apologize for the blasphemy.

  Sera shook herself a little. ‘So,’ she continued, her voice prim with virtue, ‘our father needed to learn a little humility. He needed to be taught a lesson. And – thank God! – my husband offered me that opportunity. I would be nothing without Tristan. Nothing!’ She sat back, breathing heavily.

  The room was a pressure cooker. The fluorescent lights burnt down on the three of them, bleaching them of colour. They seemed as shadows in that room: a space that had become less a place for an interview, more an arena for a personal quest. Martin had never felt so present, her nerve-endings sparking, desperate to try to reason with this woman; tear apart the noxious peculiarity of her . . . philosophy . . . for want of a better word.

  ‘Things did change,’ Sera went on, her head to one side, considering. ‘Fraser came along and Tristan became well known. People were interested in him, in us all as a family. We had no privacy. We never had any time together. They were always around. Fraser. Antonia. Hangers on. Tarts and whores.’ Sera’s face suddenly changed, snarling the words, spittle hanging from her lips. A grey lock of hair hung across her forehead, her blue eyes like stars, staring at Martin. ‘After everything I’d done for him and the church. I shut my eyes to everything. I knew what he was doing with them. I allowed it all to happen in my empire. I was the consort, I was his queen. I allowed it!

  ‘And then Antonia called him and my boys her family . . . I mean, how could I accept that? Those boys weren’t hers. He wasn’t hers – Tristan. What would happen? I asked myself, what would happen if the world found out? Who he really was? I would be fucking belittled.’

  The words shot ice through Martin’s veins. Somehow the baseness of the curse opened her eyes to the madness of this woman. And more than that, it was what Antonia had said about Tristan, back in the hotel room. Only four days ago. It felt like years. ‘And so . . .’ she said softly. ‘You took the boys . . .’

  ‘You’re absolutely right I took those boys. I took them from him. And I don’t regret a minute of it,’ Sera frowned at Martin. ‘Don’t accuse me of heartlessness, Inspector. I missed them. Of course I did. And then I regretted being banished from my own home. From my life. But,’ she said, giving a quick shrug, moving her thick plait off her shoulders, ‘he let me back in. He had to. So, it worked, didn’t it?’

  ‘You had your revenge?’

  ‘It wasn’t revenge, Inspector Martin.’ Sera tutted as if Martin were a child before looking up at her in earnest. ‘It was survival.’

  I know you’ll realize this is hard for me. You have some sympathy, don’t you? But . . . if I am to be true to myself, I have to go through it.

  Don’t pity me though.

  I know you won’t anyway. Your hatred for me is almost as profound as mine is for you, I would think.

  Think back on tha
t day.

  I left the church, taking the hand of each of my boys. I pressed the wait button at the traffic lights. The boys’ hands were hot in mine, I could feel their pulses pressing insistently into my skin. My own hand was throbbing but I pushed the pain away. Like I always did.

  The lights beeped and we crossed the road, walking away from Tristan and you and the dirt and the evil and the shit that you were all covered in.

  The boys were silent. They could tell I was hurt. Their legs ran alongside mine, trying to keep up; panting quick little breaths as I moved faster and faster.

  I headed towards the city centre, pulling the boys along behind, passing over another set of lights and then another. The wind was up and the leaves swirled in the streets. Bushels of grey clouds gathered above, they peered down on me, frowning. It was only lunchtime, but the afternoon had turned dark in that way it does, as if rain beckoned. But the clouds weren’t full; they were wisps of air, sodden only in judgment.

  ‘Mummy, stop!’ my Michael burst out at last. ‘Tired, Mummy Stop . . .!’

  But I hunched my shoulders and carried on, pushing on through the streets, past the shop windows and the pier and the lights now flickering into life in the gloom. I spoke words of comfort to myself, words the boys couldn’t hear on the rising wind. ‘To reach his heart, to break his heart. To transform stone. How?’

  ‘Mummy, what are you saying?’ Peter asked, a sob in his voice. ‘Please stop, Mummy. We want to go home.’

  ‘I don’t like it here, Mummy. Please take us home.’

  Home.

  I pulled up short. Where had I ever been able to call home? Not Sunny Blunts, that’s for damn sure. I’d thought my home was with Tristan. But then there I was today, pouring boiling water on my hand as my sister told me that we were a family. All of us! Suddenly I realized how it would come to pass. You would try to take them. My own children. You had wheedled your way in with Tristan and you would want them for your own.

  I give him something. You give him something else, you’d said.

  No.

  They are not yours to take. They are not yours.

  Supposing he wanted that? He would like this idea. The idea of polygamy; a fucking harem in his house, stinking out the bedroom with the whoring. When I had given up everything for him! I had betrayed myself. And now he would take everything from me, leaving me with nothing.

  No.

  A lorry thundered by, jolting me into the present. We had walked out of the city, beyond the lights. We were on the side of a dual carriageway. The boys cowered behind me as cars and trucks rattled by.

  Oh, but there was a scrunching inside me, a soupy mix of yearning, self-pity, a need for a point of change, to get relief from what was happening now. And then the terrible, terrible sadness.

  He will not be the one to take them. They are mine. They are mine.

  I looked up at the road and felt for the hands of my boys, still inside my grasp, sweaty and warm. They seemed more than whole just then, attached to me completely, part of me, as they had been once, each the mirror image of the other, wet, downy heads bobbing at my breast. Now, their bodies were pushed into my legs; a stifled cry came from one of them. They were afraid. He had made them afraid. This was his doing.

  But I would protect them. I was their mother.

  I would choose for them. I knew best. I am a good mum, I thought. Unlike my own mother, leaving us in the dark, all alone, with no one to hold us, no one to rock us to sleep.

  I don’t remember much. Horns blaring. Tiny hands reaching for me, reaching inside the tunnels of wind whipping past them. Headlights raining down from all heights; white lights, red lights, green. I stopped pulling. Started pushing; pushing those small, hot bodies into the stream of metal and noise and light. Then it was all upside down; the screams of the boys mixed with my own cries of failure.

  Judge me if you want.

  But it was done now. They would be safe.

  61

  Martin stared at her, blood pounding in her head, throbbing rage at every word uttered by the woman before her. She had to control herself, keep the spotlight on Sera. She thought back to the grave, to the posy of violets, and swallowed. She forced herself to detach, to soar upwards so as to look down on the scene from the ceiling above. From there, she could pull her focus solely on to Sera, ignoring what she felt inside, putting in a box somewhere else the hatred that she felt towards this woman.

  ‘Why are they buried in Peterlee? The boys? Why not in Blackpool, where they died?’

  ‘I wanted them home with me,’ Sera answered in a tight voice, her eyes glassy. ‘Always. I wanted them home.’

  ‘But you went there recently, didn’t you? To the cemetery?’

  Sera’s expression was capacious. It could have encompassed anything.

  ‘You left flowers. You left violets. What did you mean by that?’ Martin leaned forward. ‘Tell me! Did you feel guilt, finally? Did you want to make amends – for all of it? Or . . .’ An awful expression flashed across Martin’s face.

  ‘Or what, Inspector Martin?’ Sera said, her voice light, dripping through the room like liquid through muslin.

  ‘Or was it just a foreshadowing of what you’d already planned to do?’ Martin’s voice was hoarse with feeling. ‘A warning of what was to happen to Violet?’

  Sera bowed her head, her lashes resting on her cheeks. She said nothing.

  Martin slammed her hands on the desk. ‘I think this is bullshit. All this supposed logic you’re trying to feed us. There is no logic. To any of it! You planned it all – every last bit of it. Because it doesn’t work, Sera, this, this argument!’ she exclaimed, losing control, frustration fizzing through her. ‘I get it now,’ she said, skewering Sera with a stare. ‘I understand who you are.’

  Sera’s breathing was shallow as she avoided Martin’s gaze.

  ‘There’s no sense to it – Seraphina, Sarah, whatever you want to call yourself. You told us you’d been abandoned, how dreadful it had been – how it had affected you. But look what you’ve done to your own children! You pretend it was about wanting to keep the children with you, but it’s all a lie. You just wanted to hurt the man you could never leave. Your husband, Tristan Snow. Who, twenty years later, you finally killed.’

  ‘Not true,’ Sera said.

  ‘What about the lives of your children? All of the opportunities they had? You took them all away. You robbed them of it all. And you did it knowingly. How could you possibly think that that was better than being alive, having choices, having possibilities? Who are you to make that decision?’

  Sera looked at Martin for a long moment.

  ‘Who are you to do that?’ Martin repeated, her voice strong and clear in the washed-out room.

  ‘I am their mother,’ Sera replied, her fists clenching into tight balls.

  ‘If that’s what being a mother is . . .’ Martin began, her face dark with anger. ‘Then God help us all. They’re dead Sera. All of them. Michael, Peter, that lorry driver. Tristan. Violet.’ Martin stopped. To her shame, she found her eyes pricking with tears. Her voice dropped. ‘Look at this damage. Look at what you’ve caused. All those lives.’

  The room lapsed into silence again.

  ‘They were blonde, my boys,’ Sera went on, as if Martin hadn’t spoken. ‘Their hair used to stick up at the back in little tufts.’ She moved her hand to illustrate. ‘I went to their cremation, you know. I watched two little boxes go on that ridiculous conveyor belt, behind those velvet curtains. And I thought about those tufts. Flattened down with water by the morticians at the crematorium. About to be scorched by flame. And do you know what I felt, Inspector Martin, when I watched that, as I thought about that?’

  Martin waited, not breathing.

  ‘Nothing. I felt nothing.’ Sera briefly closed her eyes. ‘Can you imagine? What it’s like? Those warm and tiny bodies, that you pushed out of yourself into the world? To watch them spin and smash before your eyes? They were broken that day. Into a mi
llion pieces. And I watched it. I wasn’t afraid.

  ‘Do you think Antonia would have done that? Of course she wouldn’t. Stupid little rat-faced baby, Antonia. When she was born, she never stopped crying, kept us up all night. Took Mummy’s love like she took everything. Like she tried to take my family, later. But when I met Tristan, I could break free of her. I was absolved of all that.’

  ‘Absolved? For what?’ Martin asked.

  ‘For not being good enough,’ Sera’s voice cracked, making Martin feel sick. She was only acting, the emotion was false. ‘Not good enough for Mummy. When Tristan loved me, all that went away. I knew I was worthy of love, because he loved me. Don’t you see?’

  ‘So when you found out about his affair with Antonia . . .’ Martin said, hating as she did so that she appeared to be understanding this woman in front of her, giving her some kind of rational motive.

  ‘Oh, I knew about that the day I married him. I knew he wanted her. I saw him staring at her at the reception. She always took everything from me. My mother. My husband. But she couldn’t have my children. No, no, no,’ Sera shook her head, emphatic. ‘I would not let her have my children.’

  ‘I see. And Violet? Why did she have to die?’

  Sera’s eyes swam with tears. ‘She may not have come from me, but she was my daughter. She was. She wanted to leave, too. I couldn’t let her leave me.’

  ‘But she has left you, hasn’t she?’ Martin said. ‘She’s not with anyone now. She’s soon to be lying cold in the ground, Sera. You made sure of that.’

  Sera gave a little laugh. ‘You don’t understand, Inspector Martin.’

  ‘No, thankfully I don’t,’ Martin agreed.

  Sera looked at her, seeming genuinely puzzled. ‘Oh, it’s easy. Once they’re dead, you can keep them for ever. They’ll always be yours. No one can take them away from you. Not ever, ever, ever.’

  After she’d explained, she sat back in silence, a smile playing on her lips. Satisfied, she had the plump, feline look of the cat that has eaten up the cream.