I, Witness

by Niki Mackay

  Liz nods. ‘It’s a safe assumption, right?’

  ‘God.’

  ‘The boy’s mum was a Ruth Hanover, later married and became Ruth Reynolds.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Name mean something to you?’

  ‘It does. Jesus.’ I try and take it in. Ruth Reynolds. Kate’s mother. Ruth was a victim of a male relative. And Oliver. Oh Jesus. Oliver would be Kate’s half-brother. I don’t divulge this to Liz, instead I ask, ‘Okay, so what was he done for?’

  ‘Breaking into the Reynolds’ house, sometime around 1999.’

  ‘Fuck,’ I mutter, then ask, ‘So they knew who it was?’

  ‘Well, no, actually. It was the husband who pressed charges.’

  ‘James?’

  ‘Yes. Claimed not to know him at all.’

  ‘So what? Ruth hadn’t told him about her having Oliver?’

  Liz shrugs and lights a cigarette, coughing seconds later. It puts me off lighting my own. ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

  Liz’s phone rings and she’s instantly into an intense conversation. She hands me a printout of some of the paperwork. Oliver’s name has been carefully blacked out, he was a minor. Liz mouths that she needs to go. I nod, sitting. I do light up in the end and I drink the shitty too-strong coffee. I take the cup back to the stand and suggest haughtily that they ought to do filter. The girl smiles and says they do Americanos. I scowl at her. There’s no fucking hope.

  How the hell am I going to break the news to Kate that Oliver’s her big brother?

  32.

  Kate Reynolds

  Claudia should have been here hours ago. I’ve called and sent messages. I wonder if Marcus has got to her first. I’m tempted to head down to his office. They’ve relocated, apparently. I remember the old offices – dusty, dark-wooded. My dad, busy. ‘One day you’ll be here, Kate, you all will, sitting where I am.’ I think of Marcus now, the only one who made it.

  Oliver keeps ringing. He left a voicemail saying, ‘I need to speak to you, it’s really important, Kate . . . there are things you don’t know . . . things I have to say. Call me. Please call me.’ I have no intention of calling him. When I sent that message on LinkedIn I had had some stupid idea in my head that we might pick up where we’d left off. But I’m not a child any more. I’m old enough to realise that a man who is married with a child on the way probably isn’t going to enhance my life, and he didn’t seem interested anyway. Looking back, I don’t think he ever did. He rings again. I pick up and then hang up so he can’t leave a voicemail. If he comes around I won’t let him in. I think about the sense I had that someone was here and I put the chain across my front door. A few seconds after I do so the doorbell rings. I am frozen until I hear Madison’s voice.

  ‘I can see the shadow of your feet under the door,’ she calls. I open it, ready to laugh at myself but the smile stops when I see the look on her face.

  I am reeling as she tells me about Oliver. Little things begin to sink into my mind: I remember laughing when he’d ‘guessed’ where my bedroom was the first time he’d visited; finding him in my father’s study looking in a drawer; distracting me when I asked him why; asking about my mum. I thought he’d cared. About me. It’s too much and the thinking builds to an unbearable point. I feel the contents of my stomach rising up and I run to the bathroom. When I come out Madison is still sitting awkwardly on the arm of my sofa, studiously avoiding eye contact. I suppose there’s no easy way to tell someone they’ve committed incest.

  ‘He’s been ringing,’ I tell her, and laugh. It sounds far away. ‘He said he needed to tell me something.’ I laugh again, wishing that a wife and a child were the biggest problem with Oliver and me. My disappointment over my first and only love. Oh, the halcyon times of moments ago.

  ‘You didn’t know,’ she says lamely. I’m about to respond when my phone rings: Marcus’s landline, thank goodness.

  ‘Claudia?’

  There’s no answer but I can hear breathing, another voice mutters something cross in the background and all of a sudden the breathing stops and my father is in my ear. ‘Kate?’

  I had no idea until this precise second just how much I’ve missed him.

  For a moment I can’t speak. I am three years old with a bloody knee, his big hands picking me up and kissing it better. Hiding behind a door, watching him work at his desk. Larger than life. Inhaling the scent of his aftershave. My small arms curling around his neck. I am all of these things and then I am eighteen. Sitting in a police cell watching anger and shame in his eyes. Waiting for a rescue that never comes.

  ‘Daddy.’

  There is a pause, then he clears his throat. ‘I hate to call with bad news, under difficult circumstances . . .’

  ‘What’s happened?’ I can hear Marcus saying things in the background.

  ‘Calm down, for heaven’s sake!’ To Marcus not me. I think I hear a sob. I’m sickened when I realise it’s my brother. I don’t think I’ve ever heard him cry.

  ‘Claudia and Bethany are missing . . .’

  My head tries to make sense of this. ‘Maybe she’s gone out?’

  He sighs. I can still hear Marcus gibbering. ‘It doesn’t look that way. There seems to have been a struggle of some sort. I’m putting your brother on.’

  I feel panicky. I don’t want him to go. ‘Dad—’

  ‘We’ll speak later.’ His voice is soft and I believe him.

  ‘Kate?’ my brother says, sounding frantic.

  ‘Marcus, what’s happening?’

  ‘I got home and the front door was wide open, but her car’s here and bags. I . . . I think she might have been planning to go somewhere. With Bethany.’

  Here, she was coming here, I think. ‘Maybe she got distracted and had to nip out?’ I say instead.

  ‘She hasn’t fucking nipped out, and everything’s a mess. She wouldn’t leave it like that, or the door open.’

  I shut my eyes. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘The police won’t help until someone’s been gone for twenty-four hours, for God’s sake. Said what you did. But the fucking door’s open, the lamp’s been knocked over . . .’ He’s near hysteria.

  ‘Marcus,’ I say sharply.

  ‘Your PI . . . can your PI help?’

  ‘She’s right here,’ I say without thinking.

  ‘Well, fucking well put her on the phone!’

  I flinch as I hand the phone to Madison. I’m always on the receiving end of someone else’s rage. Naomi, if I didn’t do what she wanted; Janine, just for having the cheek to be alive; now my brother, who left me well alone when I needed him and my dad. I feel my own anger swelling. Dean used to joke that one day it would just explode out of me and be apoplectic. But it never has. I’ve always kept my cool, or remained a fucking doormat. In the end Janine left me alone because I faded into nothingness. Naomi kept me in favour as I was agreeable. Marcus kept writing his cold letters once a month and I didn’t stir things up. I wonder if this is who I’ll always be.

  I hear Madison say she’ll go to Marcus’s house. As she leaves, with a sympathetic hand on my shoulder, I feel useless. I dial Dean and then I change my mind. No. I can’t tell him this. I’m too ashamed. I sit and cry. Awash with disgust about Oliver, the only boy I’d ever been with and how tainted it all is now. He must have targeted me specifically. How sick is that? And how easy I was to get to. How in need of affection that I took it up on the first offer. I feel it again, the swell of it. Anger. I find I’m not crying any more and I feel fuller somehow, bigger. I start cleaning my flat – every nook and cranny, until everything is sparkling and then I pray quietly to whatever there might be that Claudia and Bethany are okay.

  33.

  Anthea Andrews

  I’m waiting outside Kate’s flat. I’m drinking coffee from a flask, eyes narrowed, hands clenched. I’ve been h
ere for a couple of hours with the car radio on, not really thinking much, when that blonde woman turns up. The investigator. She’d be gorgeous if she frowned less, not that I can talk. I giggle and the sound startles me. The woman runs a company called MA Investigations. I think it’s laughable that she’d take on a convicted criminal. She must be desperate. I watch her sit on the bonnet of her car and chain smoke about three cigarettes, then she opens the door and leans in. She comes out spraying herself and sliding gum into her mouth. I have always thought smoking to be a stupid habit and this sort of nonsense confirms it.

  When the investigator leaves, Kate doesn’t come out for ages. I am on the verge of giving up, but there she is. I follow her to the shrink’s office, and then I follow her home. Twice Kate turns as though she can feel my eyes boring into the back of her head. I’m careful not to stop and run, continuing on instead with casual, slow steps, looking the other way. I am masked in baggy clothes, my face shielded by a baseball cap. Soon. It will be time soon. The thought buoys me and I feel not exactly cheerful, but certainly less sad.

  34.

  Claudia Reynolds

  I open my eyes and pain shoots through my head. It’s overwhelming and for a few seconds I think I’m going to vomit. I don’t. I shut my eyes tightly, willing everything to stop spinning. When I open them again I let my focus come together slowly. Light seeps in, unfamiliar blue walls greet me. I don’t know where I am or how I got here. I remember being at home, packing . . . then . . . Oh God! Bethany! I’m scrambling now with an urgency my limbs aren’t responding to. My head is saying move but it’s slow progress. I’m on a bed. It’s not mine. It’s making moving even harder. I half-slide, half-fall off it and then I’m on wooden floorboards on all fours. The room is small and sparse. The bed is a single. There is another one next to it. On top of it is my daughter. Oh, thank God. I try to push myself up sideways and fall with a bang, but I don’t feel the repercussions anywhere on my body. My limbs feel odd, fizzy and wobbly. As if they were made from cotton wool, not flesh and bone. I can’t seem to control them properly but I have to.

  I am on my back now, stranded and stupid like an upturned ladybird, ridiculously trying to right myself. This is no good. I force myself to breathe in and out. The same way I do after Marcus beats me. When I’m in my own home, scared and wounded, needing to fight through the pain. Mind over matter. My hands become ready and I grip the edge of Bethany’s bed. I pull myself up and there she is. Relief floods me when I see her chest rise and fall. I drag myself upright, onto the bed. All my muscles shake in protest and then I flop down, close behind my daughter. I manage to wrap an arm around her before it all goes black again.

  35.

  Madison Attallee

  The house is exactly what I was expecting. Very much like mine and Rob’s, classic Surrey. A beautiful exterior but, as I well know, appearances can be deceptive. It’s not like the tower block I was raised in, on the other side of town. That looked exactly like what it was. Matchboxes piled, one on top of the other, full of poor people. Poor of pocket, poor of soul. It’s what happens when you make ghettos. When the battered and bruised only have each other to look at. No. This is a different world. One I was a part of briefly. When I was a little girl I used to lie in bed and wish to be transported out of my life into one like this and for a while I made it. I don’t think it suited me though. Now I’m nowhere, in some sort of limbo between the two. At least I’m not back where I started, I guess, and at least that second bedroom will be getting some use soon.

  I ring the bell and Marcus answers. He is far removed from the calm, cool, collected man I met at his office earlier. He is dishevelled. A worry line cuts down his face.

  ‘Hello,’ he says.

  ‘Hi,’ I reply sombrely.

  I follow him into the living room, where another man stands as soon as I enter. He looks similar to Marcus but smaller, older, less polished. He takes both of my hands in his as his son did earlier today. The gesture from him feels more genuine.

  He says, ‘Thank you for coming.’

  ‘No problem.’

  Before James can say anything else Marcus blurts out, ‘She was going to leave me.’

  I take out a pen and paper and sit. ‘What makes you say that?’

  Marcus stands and leaves the room, then comes back in with two bags which he places at my feet, pointing at each in turn: ‘Claudia’s; Bethany’s.’

  I start to go through them. A few essentials for a few days away. My heart sinks when I see a teddy bear and the books the little girl probably chose for herself. Something’s gone very wrong, but despite Marcus’s poor husband act he’s still pretty high on the suspect list. I repack the bags. James runs a hand over his face.

  I ask, ‘Do you know why she was planning to leave you?’

  He holds my gaze. I wait.

  ‘I might have been neglectful of her.’

  ‘No other reasons you can think of?’

  ‘It’s reason enough, isn’t it? Look – can you bloody find them or not?’ He stands, pulls himself upwards and uses his height to look down at me.

  I stay sitting, looking up at him and resist the urge to wink. ‘I can try,’ I say.

  ‘Well, surely you should be out looking then, eh?’

  ‘Marcus!’ James says, putting a hand on his son’s shoulder, almost physically pushing him down. He turns to me saying, ‘We’re very grateful for your help. I realise it goes beyond what, er . . . the things Kate has employed you for.’

  Marcus starts to speak again and James silences him with a look.

  ‘Ms Attallee, we will of course pay you for doing this for us, on top of whatever you’ve already agreed with Kate.’

  I shrug. ‘I can’t make any promises. There isn’t much to go on.’

  ‘We realise that. What do you need?’

  ‘Honesty.’

  There is a long pause. Marcus’s huffing breaks the silence.

  ‘We’ve told you everything we know,’ James says.

  I don’t believe that for a second but I smile anyway. ‘Can I look around?’

  Marcus frowns and looks like he might speak. James nods. When Marcus gets up to follow me I smile again. ‘I’m okay, thanks.’

  He doesn’t sit. I guess he’s weighing up what is more important right now. I’m surprised when he slumps down again, shrugging. ‘Don’t mess up my office.’

  ‘I won’t touch anything.’

  The house is big and beautifully decorated but it’s not warm. You’d have a hard time believing a three-year-old lived here. There are no toys downstairs. The office is the only room where there is any mess and most of that is on the desk. A pink Post-it note with a phone number and a kiss. Claudia must have seen it when she came in for the diary. I pick it up and slip it into my pocket. You never know. Women can get awful crazy when a man’s involved. Marcus will probably realise I’ve nabbed it despite my promise not to touch. If he wants to ask me about it though, he’ll have to have a conversation about whose number it is. The thought makes me smile.

  Most of the downstairs is open plan – one large space that combines a beautiful country style kitchen, a large living area and a huge table and chairs. The office, a more formal dining room, and a small bathroom and a conservatory are the only separated rooms. None of them look used except the open-plan part, but there is no dust, nothing out of place. Imagine cleaning rooms you don’t even use.

  Upstairs there are two spare bedrooms, also clean, with fresh bedding in each. Bethany’s room is lovely and full of toys and books. There are drawings on her desk of three people, two small ones with long hair and a giant with short hair. There are letters on a page next to it. A A A A A, B B B B B, C C C C C. They should have been at Kate’s now, safe. I quell my anger. It won’t help right now. Her chest-of-drawers is filled with little girl clothes. I get a thump in my chest remembering Molly at this age. All a
rms, legs and defiance. I have to find this kid.

  The master bedroom is huge. I open a walk-in closet filled with stunning clothes. I browse a few labels – they’re all designer. I open a few drawers, frilly, lacy, impractical knickers. High-heeled shoes line the bottom of the cupboard. Jimmy Choo, Westwood. Another walk-in is filled with suits.

  As I’m walking down the stairs I notice a plant pot at the bottom on the window ledge on its side. A small line of soil spilling along the white sill. I take a picture on my phone and check the area around it. Nothing else seems amiss, but I don’t think the plant would have remained askew on Claudia’s watch. I get back downstairs, aware of two sets of eyes following me.

  ‘Well?’ from Marcus.

  ‘Nothing to suggest where they might be, I’m afraid.’

  He sighs.

  I say, ‘I’ll take the bags with me, if you don’t mind?’

  Marcus looks as though he might speak when James steps in. ‘Very well.’ He picks them up. ‘I’ll walk you to your car, Ms Attallee.’

  Once we are outside he says, ‘You mustn’t mind him.’

  ‘He has a short fuse.’

  James turns to face me. ‘Do you have children, Ms Attallee?’

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘They break your heart, don’t they?’

  I don’t reply.

  He heaves the bags into the boot of my small, impractical car. They barely fit.

  ‘Marcus has always had a foul temper. When he was a little boy he used to get into rages he couldn’t control. He’d get so worked up I thought he would explode. Nothing like the girls. I had hoped he’d grow out of it. He seemed to, when he met Claudia. He settled down, was happy even.’

  ‘But it didn’t last?’ I think of Naomi’s bloody body, stabbed to tatters and the anger it would take. I think about Claudia and what she’s told Kate. I’m still unsure what James’s role in this is but I know this man is lying about something, and yet I don’t dislike him.

  He shakes his head sadly. ‘I don’t think so. I try to stay out of their marriage.’