Tell-Tale

by Sam Hayes

  -Why do u want 2 know? I type. What if she’s in trouble? I think. What if she needs to escape?

  -I would like to visit you.

  ‘Something’s wrong, Adam. This just isn’t how she chats online.’ My mind races, wondering if I can somehow get a cryptic message to Mick, perhaps through Laura, maybe Jane Shelley. I don’t know what to do.

  Adam stands and stretches. It’s been an emotional time for him. He doesn’t want to be drawn into my mess. ‘Class begins in a few minutes.’

  -Is that man keeping away? I ask. I have to know.

  -Which man would that be?

  ‘Frankie, I don’t want to pressure you, but—’

  ‘Just another minute. Please.’

  -The man from the gallery. I can’t bring myself to type his name.

  I turn to see if Adam’s reading over my shoulder, but thankfully he’s walked away and is talking to the librarian.

  -He’s always at our house these days. He’s cute. I think he fancies me.

  My eyes widen at her words. I can’t believe what I’m reading.

  -What do u mean? Dear God, no.

  And then, as quickly as she appeared, dramaqueen-jojo fades to grey and shows as offline. ‘No!’ I call out. My voice rings through the quiet library. Frantically, I type a message to Griff, to see if he can contact her, go round, anything, but he has disappeared too.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Adam reaches for his computer, but I grip on to it.

  ‘Please, just another few minutes. I have to see if she comes back. It’s all gone so wrong.’ Adam sees my sobs before I realise I’m crying.

  ‘Frankie, I need it for a history presentation in class. Can this wait until later?’ My head hits the desk and I nod, releasing the laptop.

  ‘Can we meet later? Will you help me?’

  The warmth of his hand on my back is all I need to know that he will.

  Sylvia comes to take over my PSHE class. ‘I’m so grateful,’ I say as I hand her my stack of notes. I’d told her I had a migraine.

  ‘What is it this week?’ she asks in the corridor. ‘Affairs with married men or alcoholism?’ She laughs and takes the notes.

  ‘We’re still talking about bullying, actually, and when it’s right to tell someone.’

  ‘Oh,’ Matron says. ‘Snitching. They’ll love that.’ And she disappears into the common room.

  Adam finds me hovering around the single computer terminal in the staffroom. A male member of staff scrolls down a page. ‘He’s been on eBay for hours,’ I whisper. Adam gives me a knowing look and taps his laptop.

  ‘Use mine, and then I have a treat in store for you.’ He winks. ‘To cheer you up.’

  In spite of everything, I manage a smile. I don’t think there are too many of them left. ‘Thanks,’ I reply, taking the laptop. I sit in the corner, as far away as possible from the other staff that come and go, gulping mugs of lukewarm coffee, moaning about their workload, marking books stacked in piles on their knees. When the computer asks for the user password, I type ‘Betsy’ and it immediately lets me in. I glance at Adam and he’s staring right back. A small smile crosses the barrier between us, another one deducted from my account.

  Dramaqueen-jojo has not been back online since our chat several hours earlier. I linger around the familiar public areas where I’ve noticed she hangs out, and in the meantime I decide to compose a message to her – the one that I would like to send but in reality cannot. It will sit in the drafts folder, a beacon of the truth; a reminder of what once was.

  I look up and stretch. My neck is sore and my fingers ache. The staffroom is empty. I typed six pages and still didn’t say everything I wanted. I sign off with a single kiss, one to last a lifetime, and save it in my Afterlife account. I pour the last dregs of coffee from the machine.

  ‘School’s out,’ someone says. I turn and Adam is there as if he has been watching over me all this time.

  ‘Your computer. I’m so sorry.’ I hand it back.

  ‘I didn’t need it. I’ve been busy.’ He puts it in his locker and clicks the padlock closed. ‘And now for your treat,’ he says. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘What . . . ?’ Suddenly I’m being led by the hand through the many corridors. We head up the staircases and along the passages that lead towards my room. ‘Where are we going?’ I don’t want a treat. He jangles a key and grins. My heart misses a beat. I pull Adam to a halt, gripping his arm. I have to tell him. Even if he’ll think I’m crazy. ‘Did you notice it too, Adam? Frazer Barnard’s hand when he was fiddling with the keys?’

  He frowns, pulling me on. ‘Notice what?’

  ‘The thumb on his left hand was missing. Didn’t you see?’ He’s silent. ‘I didn’t see it the first time we met, but while I was waiting for you to come out of the chapel, I saw he didn’t have a thumb.’

  ‘So?’ I see the twitch in Adam’s jaw, the mini frown above his eyes. Does he still think I dreamt the whole thing up?

  ‘Don’t you get it? He must have been the one staring in through Lexi’s window that night. I swear the handprint I saw didn’t have a thumb. What do you think he was doing?’ He doesn’t understand how serious this is. If I’ve been recognised, it’s over.

  ‘Being a dirty old man?’ he suggests.

  ‘Exactly,’ I say, wondering why Adam is being so casual about it. ‘Should we report him?’ My stomach turns. Police, statements, arrests . . . Then all I can think of are threats, fear, running away again.

  ‘Frankie.’ He stops, blocking the way. ‘I have never met anyone who worries as much as you do.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re going to make yourself ill.’

  ‘I’m—’

  ‘Just for now, relax. Please? Let’s deal with it tomorrow.’ He sighs, reining in his annoyance.

  I nod, thinking how easy it would be to fall into his arms until the pain eased.

  ‘Now come with me.’ He leads me past my bedroom door and a little further down the sloping corridor. Nothing is straight in this part of the building. ‘Mr Palmer gave me the key. Said he thought we might like a look. I told him about your interest in the library portraits.’ Adam wiggles the key in the old lock and eventually it gives. ‘Geoff said no one’s been in here for years, but there’s going to be a clear-out. The room’s being decorated for more staff accommodation.’ Adam goes in and flicks on the light. ‘Ta-da!’ he sings, watching for my reaction.

  It takes a moment to realise what he’s done. I laugh, shaking my head in disbelief.

  ‘Champagne, madam?’ He goes over to the table, dust motes spinning up off the dirty old floor, and peels back the foil on a bottle of Lanson. He gently releases the cork, pours carefully, and hands me a glass, watching as the bubbles rise to the brim before sinking down again. ‘Our own private viewing,’ he says, sweeping his hand around the room.

  Spread out, leaning up against the skirting boards, stacked on the window sills, hanging from whatever hooks were in the wall are dozens and dozens of paintings. ‘Mr Palmer said they’ve been stashed here for decades. He’s been through them all and only a couple were of interest to him. He says there are more in the attic above, although he’s not seen those yet. No one’s ever bothered to fetch them down.’ Adam waits for my reaction, pointing up to a hatch in the ceiling. ‘They’re all going off to an auction soon. He told me to help myself to anything I liked.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ I sip the champagne.

  ‘Since you wouldn’t come to the exhibition with me, I thought this would be second best. Some of them are quite skilful. Others are plain awful. I didn’t want to upset you though, when you told me about the man you—’

  ‘You haven’t.’ I walk round the perimeter of the room, smiling at what he’s done. Then he whips back a white cloth on the table and a feast of cold food is revealed. ‘Oh, Adam,’ I say, quite speechless. His kindness hurts.

  ‘You needed cheering up. And I needed . . .’ He falters. ‘I wanted to spend time with you. Just us
.’

  I frown. ‘A date?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Adam, there’s no way I can . . .’ I stop. He’s holding out a plate of crackers and pâté. ‘Thank you.’ I shake my head and take one.

  ‘What do you reckon?’ he says, lifting up a frameless canvas. ‘Impressionist wannabe?’

  ‘It’s awful,’ I say, laughing. ‘Perhaps a talentless pupil did it.’ I bite the cracker.

  ‘Nope. These were left here way before the school opened up. Mr Palmer doesn’t know where they came from originally. Hoarded over the years.’

  ‘That’s not bad,’ I say, pointing at another picture, humouring him, and his odd idea of a date. ‘I like the sky. It’s quite clever the way . . .’

  ‘The way that there are clouds in it?’ Adam finishes for me.

  ‘It’s terrible, too, isn’t it?’ I spray laughter.

  ‘It serves you right for not coming to a proper gallery with me.’

  ‘OK, OK, I will,’ I promise. He pours us more champagne.

  ‘And dinner afterwards?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say, meaning no. I could never betray Mick. ‘What about this one? Would you hang it on your wall?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Or this?’

  ‘No way.’

  It goes on, me lifting pictures from the dust, the pair of us laughing at them, as if we could do better ourselves, until we stumble upon a batch of canvases that are clearly more professional than the rest.

  Adam cuts some cheese. ‘Do you like Brie?’

  ‘Thank you. These are actually very good.’ I eat a grape, staring at the abstract yet somehow very real pictures that Adam has set out beneath the window. ‘They seem contemporary, ahead of their time. Look, this one’s dated.’

  ‘Nineteen eighty-three,’ Adam reads.

  ‘Ancient,’ I joke, staring at it. The champagne has made me relaxed, but for some reason the tension returns to my neck and shoulders. My head begins to ache.

  ‘Take it,’ Adam says. ‘Put it on your bedroom wall. Mr Palmer said we can have what we like. The rest will be disposed of one way or another. Probably in a skip.’

  I lean the painting up against the table. We look at more pictures, eat the food, and finish the champagne. Later, alone in my bedroom, after I sidestepped what I imagined was going to be an embrace, I straighten the new picture on my wall. I lie on my bed, staring at it, getting lost in the folds of green that make up the countryside scene, marvelling at how the flash of red, the glint of gold suggests the hunt, the baying hounds, the sound of the horn, the terrified fox.

  I fall asleep, dropping in and out of a dream, in and out of the picture. I am the fox, being chased relentlessly across the fields by a hooded man. I wake, sweating, shaking, twisting the sheets around me. It’s dark. I flick on the light. I get out of bed, throw on some clothes, facing up to what it all means.

  I run silently through the school. I need to see Adam. I need to use his computer.

  CHAPTER 53

  She couldn’t take much with her. It wasn’t as if she was an Egyptian queen and her tomb would be stuffed with possessions for the afterlife. She wasn’t sure she’d even have a life in forty-eight hours’ time. Nina stared into her dressing-table mirror, wondering who she would become.

  The house was strangely calm. Josie and Nat were upstairs attempting to use Nina’s sewing machine. She’d been called in to untangle the thread several times already. She stood in the doorway, watching the girls work. Nat was cutting fabric, while Josie joined them together. The sewing session had distracted them from making a trip to the shops, to the cinema, to potential danger. It reminded Nina of herself, how she used to make something out of nothing. The story of my life, she thought, going back into her and Mick’s bedroom.

  She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting, going over everything in her head a thousand times, like she would before a play opened. All the props must be put back in their correct places after the previous show. All the makeup checked, all the effects put away and stock reordered. There was no room for error, for a wig gone astray, or an empty bottle of fake blood. Just as now, just as in real life, everything had to be ready and perfect for the finale. She was absolutely terrified.

  Nina reached a hand across to Mick’s side of the bed. She stroked the empty space. It would be the hardest thing she had ever done. She imagined him lying there, and tried to explain to him in her head. But he rose up from the sheets in a terrible rage, demanding explanations, furious that he’d been kept out of her past.

  ‘But I’m your husband,’ she heard him say, dejected, confused, let down. Then there was Josie – turbulent, beautiful, passionate, demanding. Nina didn’t know which would hurt her more, knowing that your mother had been living a lie for her entire life, or being let down so badly that she’d never get over it.

  She’d taken the cash from the pot she kept in the utility room cupboard. Her secret Christmas fund. Before Mick’s recent success with the galleries, money had been tight. Cautious as ever, Nina had been saving here and there – ten pounds one week, twenty the next. Soon enough, a few hundred pounds had accumulated. It paid for the heap of metal that the dealer called a car.

  ‘Name?’ he’d asked, to put on the receipt.

  ‘Davies,’ Nina had said automatically. ‘Sarah Davies.’ He didn’t care, and neither did she. She had no intention of registering it. She drove the old wreck away from the garage in a cloud of smoke, and twenty minutes later it was parked in the pre-planned spot she had carefully chosen the day before. Stashed in the boot was a small suitcase containing the clothes and other necessities she had recently purchased, also using the saved-up cash. As each stage of the plan came together, Nina’s heart beat a little faster. She knew that very soon she would hardly be able to contain it in her chest.

  Mick was in his studio working. It was a good thing, Nina thought, that life was going on as normal around her. Her recent behaviour – nervous, emotional, erratic and suspicious – was a perfect answer to the aftermath that would be filled with questions; the note left, reread a thousand times.

  Why? How could she? Did anyone see it coming?

  Nina had no idea if her plan would work; only that she had no option left but to try. There was no one to turn to for help – no one that she could trust, anyway, and she didn’t want to endanger those she loved any more than she already had.

  She consoled herself with the thought that it might not be forever; that somehow if she was clever, she could claw back a shred of what she once had, maybe even return, explain, beg forgiveness. But it would be a long time off yet. Without that thought, Nina would have ended things for real. As it was, the uncertainty of her not surviving anyway hung as fat as the moon above the city. Either way, the only certainty in life now was death.

  CHAPTER 54

  I broke into a thousand pieces. The receiver dangled on its shiny cord, and, with my knees bent, my back slumped against the glass, I slid down the inside of the telephone box.

  The police were coming. I’d told them everything.

  Two female officers helped me into their car. They were bright, cheerful, acting as though nothing was wrong, humouring me, even though I knew things would never be the same again. We drove past Roecliffe. ‘There,’ I whispered, pointing into the woodland. ‘In there.’

  As we went by, I saw a single blue light ticking in the night. Marking the spot I’d described on the phone. They’d found her.

  I would never see Betsy again.

  The constables spoke in quiet voices, spoke in code on the radio, drove me through the night, glanced at me in the rear-view mirror, and took me to the police station.

  They gave me a blanket – brown and itchy, the kind fit for covering the shoulders of criminals, not the shaking bones of a young girl who had just witnessed a murder.

  Someone gave me tomato soup in a mug. Clumps of powder stuck to the sides.

  ‘Is there anyone you’d like to call?’ a man asked. He
wasn’t in uniform.

  I shook my head. Maybe Patricia, I thought. Or Miss Maddocks. But what if they’d known about this all along? ‘There’s no one I want to call,’ I said. The soup burned my lips.

  Over the next few days, I gave statements until my voice dried up. Every detail of the last ten years of my life at Roecliffe was recorded. I was sent to a foster family. I spent my eighteenth birthday with strangers, and while technically I could no longer rely on the council for care, someone had taken pity on me and allowed me to stay in the warm, comfortable home that had a mother, a father, other children, smiles and soft carpet.

  I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My temporary mother sat beside me and I pretended that it was her, my real mother, and she’d been there all along, that this was my family home and life had been filled with happiness.

  ‘I love you, Mum.’ I said the words that had been missing for so long. She stroked my head, but didn’t reply. From somewhere distant, I heard the words, I love you too.

  There was a line-up. I’d seen them in cop shows on the flickering TV at the children’s home, but never thought I’d be the one staring blankly through the one-way glass. It was easy to identify them, yet the hardest thing I’d ever done. Worse than seeing a dead body, because they were real; they were alive and dangerous. They stared back with unblinking eyes, knowing that I was only feet away even though they couldn’t see me. They were rabid dogs and they’d got my scent.

  There were three separate line-ups of carefully selected adult men. They wore sweaters, glasses, brown shoes, some had their hair combed back. A couple wore rings and watches, and one was taller than the others. They were normal.They were someone’s father or son or brother. They would blend in on the street.

  ‘That one,’ I said immediately. They’d already made three arrests based on my statement. The line-ups were to officially confirm who I’d seen. Two detectives stood behind me. I knew I was being observed, through the one-way window behind me: them watching me watching them. ‘Number two.’