Her chest burned as if she’d been running. She could see light emerge as they crested the slope: a sliver of light, no more than that. A house, below the curve of the hill. Memorise it: we knew nothing until Isabel told us. Matt had his suspicions.
‘I’ll do the talking to start with,’ said Matt.
‘The journalist knows,’ she said, dully, and she heard him take a breath, in. ‘But it doesn’t matter any more. I don’t care.’ And she didn’t. ‘As long as Finn’s all right.’
Something slid below the chassis, one wheel on the grass, hitting the mud, two wheels, and the van lurched.
She would pray, but there was no one she believed in. Take me instead.
The wheels spun, they were at an angle and the engine revved uselessly: the van didn’t move, they stalled. Bridget flung open the door and began to run, towards the dark house that sat half below the slope, muffled in a softer dark that was vegetation. She heard Matt behind her. Both knowing. Skidding on the cold, wet grass, she could hear her own breath: tried to keep the sliver of light in her sights but it tilted and jumped with every step.
The towers loomed above them as they ran, rectangles of light higher up. Once a woman threw herself from high up on Rose Hill. She must have had no son, was all Bridget could think, drenched in the rain, cold and terrified, her jeans slimed with mud and her legs heavy as lead but still running, running. Go.
A sign on the gate in university lettering, warden: Bridget flung it aside, still in front, and then they were at his door, shoulder to shoulder and she was battering on it, pounding with both fists, then down to the letterbox and shouting, yelling through it with all the force of her lungs.
Finn. Finn.
Matt standing back and bellowing, up to the windows.
Finn. Finn.
On her knees in the wet Bridget shouted through the letterbox, she screamed. ‘Let me in. Stay away from my son, stay away from him.’ And suddenly she became aware that Matt wasn’t behind her any more. There was the sound of smashing glass from somewhere round the back, and a shout. I’m in.
Inside there was a bellowing, it was Matt, bellowing like an animal, and then the door was wrenched open in front of her, on to a dark hallway and Matt already running back into the house, down past a long stairway.
Let it not be too late. Don’t touch him. Don’t touch my son.
She heard a sound from upstairs, a whimper, frightened. She screamed, ‘Finn!’ He was in there. He was crying for his mother: she could hear him, upstairs.
And then she was on the stairs, flying up in the dark, choking in the unfamiliar smell of a stranger’s house, her every sense was assaulted by the place, the smell of bedclothes, curtains, damp, other people’s food, she felt herself retch.
Finn, Finn, I’m coming, Mum’s here, we’re here. But she couldn’t hear the words, her breath was gone, all used up on the stairs.
Flying, flying. Matt was behind her. And then she was on a landing, with three doors, all dark.
There was a scuffling then a small horrible sound, the worst sound, a sob but it told her: there. That door. In two steps she was across the landing and the door flew back ahead of her with such force it hit the wall behind it. The room was not quite dark, some light filtered through the closed curtain. It was warm, and there was a smell. A smell of chemical and animal together, and she saw movement in the dark.
She groped for a light switch, not knowing what she would see, but behind her Matt got there first, and light flooded the room, a shade swinging on a bedroom with one wall covered by mirrored wardrobe. The wrapped giant teddy bear discarded, face down in a corner.
The next thing she saw was Alan Timpson, fat in a brown towelling bathrobe that revealed his thighs. How did, how did he—? he had one hand to his face and then she saw blood: there was blood on the front of the robe. But Matt had come round her, he was between them so she couldn’t see, then she could. In the mirror she saw Finn’s face, his torn shirt.
Matt’s arms around his boy, their boy, she could see Finn’s black unruly hair sticking up, his face buried in his father’s neck. Alan Timpson was saying something, mumbling something. He was swaying, but not taking a step.
‘Common assault,’ he was saying.
In time.
Finn broke away and his arms were out to her. She saw his torn shirt but his trousers on, belt on and then she saw his knuckles were raw and she grabbed him, her arms around his back, broader than she knew. Looking over his shoulder she saw that the blood was coming from Timpson’s nose. She saw Matt take a step towards him and then stop, three feet from him, blocking him. Just standing there.
‘I didn’t,’ Finn was saying, into her cheek, gasping. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I didn’t mean to—’ Finn who’d never hit anyone in his life.
‘Good boy,’ she said. And said it again. And again. ‘Good boy. Good boy.’
And then someone was calling, from downstairs.
The door was wide open when Gill got there: the hallway was dark, and then a light came on and she saw Bridget O’Neill at the top of the stairs. Bridget Webster now but she’d always be Bridget O’Neill to Gill. That girl in the school prize-giving picture taking a book from Anthony Carmichael, so skinny you could snap her in half but not so fragile, it turned out.
Standing up there in mud-spattered jeans and a sweatshirt with a streak of mascara down one cheek she was still small but she looked like a prize-fighter to Gill. Her fists were clenched.
The laptop was under Gill’s arm: she’d run with it down the hill, snatching it off the table and leaving the kid’s cable dangling, his eyes on stalks. She saw Bridget look at it, then at her. She could hear a man talking, in a low voice, somewhere up there, another voice, raised, querulous, whining.
‘It’s you,’ said Bridget O’Neill, clearly, looking at her.
In the next moment Gill heard the police sirens and with the sound she saw Bridget take a step back, shaking her head, as her husband emerged behind her on to the landing – and the boy. Their son: the three of them up there stood still a moment together, close: holy, was the word that came to Gill in that strange second, an uncharacteristic second, until she shook her head.
Then Matt Webster was coming down the stairs towards her: he was pale and there was blood on one cheek and on the hand she saw gripping the banister but he seemed very calm. His steps on the stairs were measured.
When he reached her he stopped and they both looked down at the laptop. Slowly she put it away in her backpack. Matt Webster stood in front of her still quite calm and waited for her to speak. A polite man.
Bridget and her son were coming down the stairs, awkward and slow because they seemed unwilling to let go, walking side by side. They came around Matt and Gill and walked out through the open front door. Then Gill spoke.
‘I think it’s best if I hang on to this, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Until – well, let’s say, until the police have done their bit with you?’
Matt looked at her a moment with his lips pursed, then he nodded. ‘And then?’ he said.
‘Then – there are ways,’ Gill said, carefully. ‘Aren’t there, well, you would know, ways of destroying a hard drive, aren’t there? Beyond recovery.’ He nodded, still not moving. ‘And you’d show me, how to do that?’ she said.
Wondering. If the engineer would still be in the purple lobby of the hotel in the far-off time when she would be able to crawl back there, and if he would ever get to look like this bloke.
And Matt Webster didn’t smile but something came alive in his face. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.
It was almost eleven when they got back home: Matt had insisted the taxi take them from the police station back to the van, and a further twenty patient minutes spent getting it back on the road. Neither of them said they didn’t want the police towing it, but both of them were thinking it. It was the two of them, now. When they pulled in Bridget saw the kitchen light was on.
The police station hadn’t been what she’d expected
. A Sunday night, not even late, and it had been clean and orderly, and they’d been treated with kindness. The female officer they’d come back with was brisk but solicitous, a male one was polite and warm. ‘Let’s get you home as soon as possible,’ he said, a hand on Matt’s shoulder.
Seven o’clock when they walked across the car park with the crackle of police walkie talkies flanking them. Timpson had come in a separate car and they didn’t have to see him again, the policewoman who walked them into the comfortable relatives’ room said that straight away and Finn had nodded, saying nothing.
He was very pale: sometimes he looked at his sore knuckles wonderingly.
They’d talked to him with both her and Matt present. Then to her and Matt separately. Bridget remembered what to say, and she knew Matt would. No acting was necessary: she only had to live in the last three hours and all she felt was fear for Finn, and outrage.
Would it work? It might. It felt as though she was believed. Why shouldn’t she be? They were Finn’s parents. The police officers – three of them in the room – were only considerate. Only sympathetic. Perhaps – she hardly dared to think it – perhaps the system was on her side. Their side.
They mentioned Anthony Carmichael to her only once. The woman asked the question. Had Bridget known the girl, Magdalena Breska? They had brought her in, straight away; though Bridget hadn’t seen her she’d heard a voice in the corridor, raised, indignant, that she knew was Magdalena’s, though she kept her head down when she heard it.
‘Her picture apparently had been used without her consent on the Facebook page for Phoebe James, using an email address traced to Dr Timpson’s account,’ said the policewoman wearily, with a trace of scepticism. ‘It is the picture on her ID card, which her employer had for safekeeping.’
Had Bridget recognised her? She’d shaken her head in the quiet, dingy room. ‘I don’t think so. Matt said. Matt said she worked for – someone Alan Timpson knew.’
They would talk to Matt again, they said. About his suspicions, as computer officer.
‘Anthony Carmichael,’ the policewoman had said, without even looking up. ‘Yes, we’d like to talk to Mr Carmichael.’ And the moment had passed, they were standing up. ‘You can take your son home, Mrs Webster,’ she said.
Climbing out Bridget saw Laura’s car on the drive, but only Carrie and Isabel were in the kitchen, sitting at the table, a pot of tea and three mugs.
‘Where’s Laura?’
Carrie was on her feet, jerked her head upstairs. ‘She’s got my bed,’ she said. ‘She was dead on her feet. I’ll take the sofa.’ Isabel had stood too, taller somehow already than Bridget remembered her but quiet and obedient still.
Bridget nodded, bone tired, smelling of the police car, ready in that moment just to disappear, to leave them all to it and evaporate but then half turning to check on Matt and Finn she caught something. Isabel’s face turned towards Finn, and a look, an expression of joy and relief mixed that wiped everything out, even if just for those seconds. So simple, to be a child, Bridget thought, so simple, to be lit like that from inside like a window, and with the thought, something shifted.
They stood aside, the three adults, and Isabel went straight to Finn and hugged him. Bridget saw his shaggy head turn, over the slender girl’s shoulder, she saw the overgrown boy marking off the signs, the kettle and the fridge magnets and the school timetable on the wall and the pencilled marks on the doorframe where he had grown taller. He was home. They were home.
Postscript
It seemed a hundred years since Gill Lawson had walked into this same station bar and half-recognised Carrie O’Neill, but it was only fifteen months. She bought a takeaway coffee and walked out into the early spring air. She turned on the spot, looking for those towers, but curiously considering they’d seemed to be everywhere last time she was here, she couldn’t see them.
Gill had met up with Matt, on three occasions since that freezing wet November. Each time in London, each time on neutral ground. To make sure of certain things, and it had been reassuring to Gill that her priorities, which had felt like they were set in concrete (the story first, the story second, the story third fourth and fifth) had adjusted, without her even thinking about it. First, to make sure Finn was all right, that poor stunned kid she’d seen with his mother’s arm around him, and it seemed he was: going out with Isabel for eight months now and heading off on holiday with her family this summer. Doing well at school.
Then that Bridget was OK.
Matt had nodded, thoughtful. ‘We’re thinking about moving abroad,’ he said. ‘Once Finn’s at university.’ They’d been sitting in a garden square near King’s Cross, with pigeons pecking around their feet, Matt examining their movements. Then he’d raised his head. ‘Her sister’s there, you see?’
‘Carrie.’
He’d nodded. ‘Her and her girlfriend Ella, they got back together after all the – all the— Well. Ella’s French, you see. Moved to the middle of nowhere, but—’ He let it hang. ‘And Finn’s keen.’
‘Good idea,’ Bridget had said, carefully. ‘No rush, but yes. Good idea.’
She was quite certain the police – even if the worst happened, even if Carmichael, wherever he was, was recovered and identified – would not pursue the circumstances of his death too far. Would not make the connection – because there was no connection, no record any more beyond that school photograph, that Bridget O’Neill had been abused by him.
Carmichael’s car had been found at a dismal seaside resort, and the conclusion reached privately by the police – with the help of testimony from both Gill and Magdalena Breska that he had been about to be exposed, that he had been at the end of his tether and behaving irrationally – was that he had either fled the country, to disappear to Thailand or Brazil where, eventually he would resurface, or that he had committed suicide.
Gill had found Magdalena a job in London as a live-in housekeeper, and helped her with her residency application. She liked Magdalena, against all the odds. Did that make her safe? No such thing as a hundred per cent safe. You had to tolerate uncertainty.
There was Alan Timpson, of course – or there had been, keeping mulishly silent throughout his trial. Found guilty of grooming and a variety of child sex offences that would keep him on the sex offenders’ register for the rest of his life, and sentenced to three years, of course it had still hung there, over them all, that he knew.
‘Bridget says she admitted nothing to him,’ Matt had said, beside her on a bench in Green Park last autumn, and Gill had seen the colour rise suddenly in his face, just saying her name Gill saw he was ready to fight for her. That was what mattered, she finally understood, it was why she’d pounded away at this for fifteen years. Standing next to another human being who needed protection and fighting for them: didn’t have to be boyfriend, girlfriend, lover, son. Someone, was all.
She’d tried to get to Timpson after the trial, but he wouldn’t talk to her. He was shtumm. It might mean he wouldn’t talk to the police either – but it might not. He was a bastard, and as long as he was alive they would have to be afraid. How many nights had she prayed for him to hang himself, overdose, or for some violent cellmate to cut his throat? Not healthy, those thoughts.
None of those things had happened.
But she had news for Bridget. It was why she was coming. Alan Timpson was dead. Turned out he’d had cancer growing in his prostate for seven or eight years, undetected, undiagnosed, untreated: it had spread to his lungs and his brain, and it had killed him. She hoped it had been fucking painful.
Steve was authorising taxis these days. Gill climbed in and told the driver where she wanted to go.
Bridget stood at the window, her fingertips to the glass that was plastered with sale signs, watching.
That morning, alone in the house among packing cases, she had taken out the box of photographs and walked out into the back garden, where Matt had laid a fire in a steel drum, ready to go, before leaving for work. Cup of tea,
bicycle helmet, last look up at her at the window. She dropped the photographs in, one by one, without looking at them. She had slowly stripped the box into pieces and burned that, too.
The signs on the shop window said, CLOSING DOWN SALE. EVERYTHING MUST GO.
You couldn’t know, could you? You could never know for sure, what tomorrow would bring you. Even in another country, where a small stone house waited for them in the foothills of some mountains two valleys from where Ella had been born, and a job for Matt in the local college, and a small amount of money in the bank and Finn safe at university. You couldn’t know. You could only hope.
The last of the stock was being packed up in boxes to be collected by a discount wholesaler. She’d sold the van for scrap and Laura and her baby had moved back up north to live with her mother, after coming for one last look around the shop, that small space where they’d moved warily around each other for those terrible weeks. The shop’s lease had been taken over by a coffee shop chain: they were getting everything stripped out, steam cleaned and sandblasted. Standing in the doorway to the little kitchen Bridget had seen the trace of a smile on Laura’s lips when she’d told her that. ‘It did need a good clean,’ she’d said. And Laura did look up then, the baby against her shoulder, up to the shelf where the box of Easter eggs and cherry blossom had filled a space, but only for a second and then, breezy, she was turning to leave.
Bridget had to go back, one last time; she had to make sure that there was no trace left, no stain, no clue, no odour. It might have looked as if she was just waiting, standing there in the middle of the shop, but she was looking, then she closed her eyes and she was listening, smelling, registering as she felt every molecule of the air on her skin. If there were ghosts, she would know; if she was going to be punished, then it would be here; if they were going to come for her, it would be now.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 32