All the Hidden Truths

by Claire Askew

  ^ 2041 people liked this

  USAimee I hope the police are squeezing Moira Summers in interrogation. I have three sons and there is no way I wouldn’t know if they were planning something like this.

  This sure was PLANNED! Even if he didn’t tell her about it then mother’s intuition must have kicked in. If it turns out she knew about this and told no one then she can ROT IN JAIL and then BURN IN HELL.

  ^ 1997 people liked this

  magdadgam beautiful girls who were killed by this psyco (sp???): u were loved, may god bless u, u r in all our prayers. 13 new angels got their wings that day xxxxx

  ^ 1679 people liked this

  One week later

  21 May, 10.00 a.m.

  The driveway had filled with flowers. It had started the night of the shooting, when the first few victims’ names had been officially released to the press, Abigail’s among them. At first, it was just a couple of bouquets: Rehan had needed to move them in order to squeeze his car in behind Ishbel’s. When he’d mentioned them, Ishbel assumed that the bouquets had been left by the neighbours on either side – neither household could ever bear to be outdone by the other. But two days later – the evening that Ishbel had forced herself to get up, get dressed and drive to Fettes Avenue for the meeting with the other victims’ families – she’d unwittingly driven over a soft buffer of flowers as she backed out of the driveway. Now, Rehan had been forced to find a parking space down the street. The pile of flowers formed a small hedge running the full length of the property, and the bouquets had encroached so far up the driveway that some were leaning against the Qashqai’s back wheels.

  ‘There must be hundreds now,’ Rehan said, taking off his coat in the hall. ‘People really do care.’

  Ishbel turned away. She was still in her dressing gown, though it was mid-morning. She’d been in her dressing gown most of the week, in fact. She was aware that Rehan must be noticing her hair, pulled into greasy spires after days of going unwashed; must be noticing her red face, puffed and bruised as a boxer’s from crying. Rehan seemed very young to her – too young, surely, to be doing a job like this. His dark hair was cropped very short and he wore those large-framed glasses that seemed to be so fashionable. In a line-up, Ishbel would have pegged him as an art student, not someone whose job it was to help people through the darkest hours of their lives. Not that he seemed to be helping a great deal. Through the fog of her grief, she resented his almost-constant presence in their house; it seemed that whenever she woke up, fuzzy from the pills Greg had given her, he was there. And she resented the esteem in which her husband seemed to hold him.

  She drifted into the living room, to squint out of the big window as best she could. Journalists were regular visitors to the street, now – and to the house. They tried their luck, flitting in and out of the garden like bats, seeing how close they could get. Some were brass-necked, marching right up to the door and ringing the doorbell. Others phoned the landline repeatedly, sometimes stood at the bottom of the garden in plain sight, their phones clamped to their ears, hopeful as dogs. Cars lurked at the end of the driveway. The bins were rifled, the recycling. The front lawn was muddled by boot-prints, and at the garden hedge the gaggle ebbed and flowed, stashing their cigarette butts in the privet. One night – she wasn’t sure when, how long ago – Ishbel had woken in the spare-room bed to hear Aidan’s creaky tread on the loft-ladder; the sound of him rooting about in the loft above her head. A stray thought had come to her: what if he’s making a noose? She imagined him swinging out into space, his feet and legs crashing through the ceiling to rain plaster shards all over her. The thought came to her because she’d considered it herself: under the heavy cloud of the sedatives she’d half dreamed of running a bath, putting her face under the sudsy surface of the water, and just never coming back up.

  As it turned out, Aidan had been in the loft searching for the old net curtains – a vain attempt to keep the press from aiming their lenses into the windows. Beyond the grubby lace, the garden was shrouded in a thick fog, as though the very weather itself had been brought low by the shooting. At the foot of the short driveway the gaggle of journalists dithered, like spectres.

  ‘I could bring you a few in, if you like.’ Behind her, in the living-room doorway, Aidan was speaking. ‘While I’m out there.’

  Ishbel didn’t look round. She was watching Rehan, who’d gone back outside. He was setting up an old black music stand of Abigail’s on the lawn, a few feet out from the front door. She was remembering that night – last night? A few nights ago? She honestly didn’t know – that she’d heard Aidan scraping about in the loft space. She’d been naive, she thought: Aidan was far too pragmatic for suicide. Too angry. His eyes cold at the hospital; again as he sized up Barry Kesson.

  ‘Bring me a few in . . . of what?’

  She heard him sigh.

  ‘The flowers, Bel. The bouquets. Reh says some of them have cards on.’ This pet name Aidan seemed to have permanently adopted: pronounced Ray. Ishbel didn’t know how he could stand to be so familiar. ‘I thought you might like to read what people are saying. About Baby.’

  Outside, Rehan walked backwards a few steps, studying the music stand.

  ‘What could they possibly have to say? They didn’t know her.’

  He didn’t make any noise, but Ishbel could tell that Aidan had advanced towards her. When he spoke again, his voice was closer.

  ‘I’m just trying to be . . .’ He paused. ‘Constructive, here.’

  One of the journalists had called out to Rehan. He was walking down the garden towards them. Ishbel watched as his shoes began to glitter with the moisture from the wet grass.

  ‘You know I don’t agree with this,’ she said. ‘With what you two are doing.’

  Aidan took another step towards her – now, she could hear his breath.

  ‘Bel,’ he said. ‘Reh thinks it’s a good idea. Get the press on side. He says that giving a press conference will give them something to write up – get at least some of them to go away. We want that, don’t we? Some privacy?’

  Ishbel turned her head a little. He was standing almost directly behind her, watery in the corner of her vision.

  ‘Going out there and parading in front of them isn’t privacy,’ she said.

  There was a silence, which seemed to stretch and vibrate, and then the crackle of paper.

  ‘I thought you might like to read this,’ Aidan said. ‘The statement I’ve written. Tell me if there’s anything you want to add.’

  Ishbel turned her head slightly further, far enough to glimpse the typed A4 sheet that Aidan had unfolded and held out towards her.

  ‘No,’ she said, turning back to the window, and away from him. ‘I don’t want to add anything. I don’t want you to do this, Aidan. I don’t want you to say anything at all.’

  She heard him sigh again.

  ‘Why are you making this so hard? I don’t want to have to go against your wishes.’

  Rehan had almost reached the reporters – though he had to stop to pick up and rearrange some of the flower bouquets. That morning when he’d arrived, he’d tunnelled a small path through them, and some had fallen back into it, or new ones had been placed over the top.

  ‘Then don’t,’ Ishbel said. ‘For once, you could do as I ask.’

  Aidan made a clucking sound in his teeth.

  ‘Bel,’ he said, ‘you’re grieving. You’re barely awake. You’re not yourself. I really don’t think you know what’s best right now.’

  She whipped her head round and looked at him properly. In one hand, he was still holding the typed statement. In the other, bizarrely, an empty picture frame.

  ‘And you do? You’re just totally clear-eyed right now, are you?’ She dropped her gaze, and her voice became quieter. ‘I don’t know, maybe you are. Maybe that’s because you’re not grieving.’

  She heard her own words hanging in the air between them, and regretted them.

  ‘Or not in any obvious way,’ sh
e added.

  ‘Someone,’ Aidan said, the word coming out slowly, from bared teeth, ‘has to do the things that need to be done. Someone around here has to be responsible right now. We can’t both just float around the house rending our garments.’

  Ishbel turned back to the window. Don’t let him see you bleed, she thought, swallowing down tears. Outside, Rehan was waving the first of the journalists through the little path he’d made in the bank of flowers. He was pointing towards the music stand, which looked like some absurd sculpture in the middle of their small lawn.

  ‘It’s getting to the point,’ Aidan was saying, ‘where we need to start organising our daughter’s funeral. I need you to pull it together for that.’

  Ishbel began to shake her head, and then found she could not stop. The word funeral rattled about in her head, and she wanted to shake it loose – to shake loose the very suggestion.

  She was still shaking her head when Aidan finally added, ‘I gave Reh the photo of Baby off the top of the piano.’

  She stopped, abruptly. The photo frame in his hand: she could place it now.

  ‘Why?’

  Aidan sighed again. It seemed to her that over the past few days he’d become adept at sighing – sighing his impatience as they waited at the hospital to be told of Abigail’s condition; sighing his stoic acceptance in the morgue as they formally identified their daughter. He’d sighed a thousand times at Ishbel’s more untidy responses to the events of these few days. She’d listened to the sigh of his snore, drifting down the landing to the spare room where she lay, wondering how on earth he – or anyone else on this godforsaken earth, for that matter – could sleep, when such events were allowed to unfold.

  ‘For the press,’ he said. ‘I want them to stop running that dreadful picture of her they pulled off Facebook. It’s years old. She looks like a child.’ He waved the empty frame. ‘This is a much better photo. She’d have preferred it.’

  Ishbel closed her eyes. She’d looked at that photo many times: a studio portrait they’d booked for Abigail as part of her eighteenth birthday present. For the occasion, Abigail had worn her favourite top: coral-coloured, with a boat neck, made from a poly-cotton blend so soft that Ishbel was always surprised by the feel of it among the laundry. Ishbel felt a sudden ache for that top, folded quietly into its dark drawer in Abigail’s upstairs room. Outside, Rehan had amassed a small crowd of journalists: some with tablets and smartphones, audio recorders; some with TV cameras hoisted onto their shoulders.

  ‘You should go,’ Ishbel said. ‘Your public’s waiting.’

  But Aidan had already left the room. As she spoke, he stepped out of the front door, walking into her line of sight, and a flashbulb lightning storm.

  Ishbel remembered the day they’d moved into the house. It was 1991, about the worst possible year they could have picked to enter the housing market. They’d been searching for months, and had fallen into a terrible pattern: on finishing work, they’d meet up at the latest house or flat for a viewing. Inevitably, one of them would love it, and the other hate it. They’d trudge to the nearest bus stop in silence, ride back to their fifth-floor rented flat in silence, and climb the hundreds of cold tenement stairs in silence. Then they’d argue into the evening – over the property they’d just seen, over money, or over the question of children. This was, of course, before Abigail, but Ishbel was convinced they ought to try and buy a place where they’d have room for a child. Aidan argued that they couldn’t afford anywhere that big, that they should buy small and scale up once the recession passed. Ishbel would ask him how he knew that it would. Aidan would laugh in the face of her naivety, and then Ishbel would accuse him of not really wanting children at all, and just being too cowardly to admit it. The evening would usually end with at least one slammed door.

  Then Aidan’s father had died, suddenly, of what Aidan called ‘a good, clean, Scotsman’s heart attack’. Aidan’s mother, Pauline, hadn’t wanted to stay in the big house in Primrose Bank alone: ‘I’m positively rattling around in it, hen,’ was how she’d put it. She’d given the house to them as an exchange. ‘Give me some braw wee grandkids,’ she’d said, ‘and we’ll speak no more about it.’

  Remembering her promise to her mother-in-law made her cry new, quiet tears now – though she wasn’t sure what they meant. It physically hurt to do so, but she tried to breathe slowly and examine the various feelings that were sloshing through her, unbidden. There was that long shadow of grief, which pulsed with the words she’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead – it felt like a cold fist opening and closing around Ishbel’s heart. There was anger, certainly – a scattergun kind of anger with nothing, really, to aim at. There was weariness that verged on boredom: an almost overpowering desire to just no longer be awake, to turn off all thoughts, cut off the air supply. But bigger than all of these things, she realised, with a loud, unbidden sob, was guilt. Guilt at having lost her child, her only child, at having failed to protect her, to do the one thing a mother is supposed to do. Guilt at having reneged on the deal with Pauline. Guilt at the fact that, five minutes ago, she had implied that her grief was somehow more legitimate than Aidan’s, more pure – and guilt that yes, she believed it, though some part of her knew it wasn’t how such things worked.

  She watched her husband turn from the circled pack of journalists and walk back up towards the house – that very same house – and wondered if there was a limit to how much one person could cry. If such a limit existed, she thought, she must surely be edging near it.

  Aidan walked into the room, and Ishbel felt a twinge of anxiety.

  ‘Did you shut the front door?’ she asked. Her voice sounded more combative than she’d intended. ‘I didn’t hear it.’

  Aidan threw a glance behind him, and then turned back.

  ‘No,’ he said, and in his voice was that same irritation she was starting to get used to. ‘Reh’s right behind me.’

  He gestured vaguely backwards, toward the sound of footsteps in the front hall. Ishbel looked back out of the window.

  ‘He isn’t,’ she said. A knot of fear formed in her throat. ‘He’s still out on the lawn, look . . .’

  Aidan didn’t often look panicked. He prided himself on his composure – had continued to do so, even after the shooting. But now, he looked panicked.

  ‘Then, who—?’

  They both turned to face the doorway. Standing there: a thin man in a dark grey coat.

  Police, Ishbel heard herself thinking. He must be a policeman – who else would think it acceptable to walk right into the house? Something bothered at her, an itch near the back of her skull: she recognised this man from somewhere.

  ‘Mr and Mrs Hodgekiss?’ The man looked pleased with himself, like he was trying not to smile. ‘My name is Grant Lockley. I’d like to ask you some questions, if I may.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Aidan said. Ishbel could feel him weighing up the situation, running through possible scenarios in his mind. She could hear it in his voice. ‘I don’t know who you are. Can we see some identification?’

  The man only loosened his smile, made it wider.

  ‘I’d like to ask if you have any theories,’ he said, ‘about why Ryan Summers might have committed this terrible atrocity. I know Abigail was the first of the victims to be killed. Do you have any idea why that might be?’

  ‘Listen,’ Aidan said, ‘I don’t like this line of questioning. I won’t answer that question, or any other for that matter, until you tell us who you are.’

  Ishbel knew her husband had spoken, but she didn’t really hear him. She could feel her face and hands prickling, and little sparks began to appear in her vision. No one had told her that Abigail was the first.

  Ishbel watched as Aidan’s posture shifted, just slightly – he was trying to intimidate the smaller man, bracing himself as though this interloper might run at him. She could swear she saw, on the back of his neck, the fine, blond wisps of his hair lift, like the hackles on a dog. She opened her mouth. She
wanted to speak, though she had no idea what she might say. Instead, she found she could only gulp at the air, her mouth slack. Aidan seemed unmoved by this information: it wasn’t new to him. Rehan must have told him, sometime over the past few days, while she was asleep. She ought to be angry about this, she knew. But her brain was chanting, Why would she be first? Why would he shoot her first?

  ‘My name is Grant Lockley,’ the man said again. ‘I’m trying to get to the bottom of why Ryan Summers did what he did. There are a lot of people out there who want to know.’

  Fear vibrated inside Ishbel like a struck piano wire: this was the man she’d seen at the hospital, the man who took the photograph of the boy on the gurney. She kicked herself: until now, she’d forgotten all about him. And now he was staging an ambush.

  ‘You’re a journalist, aren’t you?’ Aidan said.

  The man placed one hand on his chest.

  ‘I’m the person who’s going to get to the bottom of all of this for you, Mr Hodgekiss – sort this out. I see that as my job, in this whole sorry mess.’

  Maybe it was coincidence, Ishbel heard herself think. Maybe she was just in the way.

  Aidan balled his fists.

  ‘Reh!’ he bellowed. Ishbel glanced out of the living-room window to where Rehan was still standing in the gaggle of journalists, answering questions. She saw his head flick upwards.

  ‘Reh!’ Aidan shouted again.

  When Ishbel looked round, Grant Lockley seemed to have fixed his gaze on her. Once again, she became very aware of her dishevelled appearance: her grubby neck and dirty fingernails; the white, unshaved legs sticking out from the bottom of her dressing gown.

  ‘Mrs Hodgekiss,’ he said, his voice quieter now. ‘Don’t you want justice for your daughter? Don’t you want to find out why she was so senselessly killed?’

  The wire inside Ishbel snapped. She elbowed Aidan out of the way and flew at the little man in the doorway.