Tell-Tale

by Sam Hayes

  ‘Take your time,’ the detective said.

  ‘I don’t need to. It’s him.’ It was easy. I’d seen him pretty much every day during my years at Roecliffe Primary School. The kids liked him; he was popular. He made up stories and let us do our work outside in the summer. ‘He was one of the men in the chapel. His name is Mr Tulloch.’

  The next line-up consisted of six middle-aged men. Most wore dark jackets, except the last one who wore a beige coat. ‘That one,’ I said, pointing to a grey-haired man in a navy blazer. ‘Mr Leaby was in the chapel too.’ I looked away. He’d been in charge of the children’s home forever. Hundreds of children had passed through his care. The detectives nodded. I sipped the water they’d put out for me, feeling the veneer around my soul harden as the final group of men were brought in front of the glass screen.

  This time, I took a little longer. The youngest of the men I’d witnessed that night was the one who buzzed around the grounds of Roecliffe on his ride-on mower. Some of the older girls had a crush on him, and some of the boys got to sit on his knee as the tractor carved grooves in the massive lawns.

  ‘He was there too,’ I said. ‘Number five.’ I pointed at his scraggy features. ‘He’s called Karl.’

  I learned, after the trial, that his full name was Karl Burnett. His mother was German. His father was a wife-beater, a drug dealer, a car thief, with a second home behind bars. Growing up in gangland London, Karl had seen the darker side of life. But he wasn’t stupid or without ambition. The papers told his story, about how he’d moved away from the scene of his deprived childhood to start a new life in the north. He’d enrolled in college, taken a part-time job with a landscape gardening firm, fallen in with the wrong people; the same people that had haunted the lives of dozens of children at Roecliffe.

  There was no fourth line-up. What point was there in showing me a group of men with black hoods on their heads? None of the arrested would talk, spill names; none were up for telling tales. The one who killed Betsy was the one who walked free.

  The first threat came two days before the trial began. The three men whose identity I had confirmed were in custody, but there were more of their kind out there. Even though the children’s home had been shut down immediately, the kids farmed off to other institutions, some of the sickos continued underground, avoiding police radar. That was what it was all about, a detective told me when I asked. ‘We’re cleaning up all the shit,’ he said.

  It was an anonymous phone call, at my foster home, plainly telling me that I would die if I didn’t change my statement and tell the police that I was mistaken about what I’d seen. By that time, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Other evidence proved that Leaby, Tulloch and Burnett were guilty of heinous crimes to dozens of children.

  Tulloch had confessed during one of his many grillings by the determined detective in charge of the case. He named several others in the ring, but refused to name the hooded one. The police told me they’d got a squealer, that they were going to catch Betsy’s killer. Then they found Tulloch hanging in his cell. Someone had given him a belt.

  Further arrests followed. Bodies were exhumed from all over the grounds of Roecliffe, the first being Betsy’s limp form from her shallow grave. There would be no funeral. Just a medical cremation after forensics had finished with her.

  After I was hit by the car, I had a police guard in hospital. ‘Someone wants you dead,’ the detective told me. He had a daughter my age, he said. He showed me a crumpled photo stuck inside his wallet. She was dark-haired, like me, but prettier. He would look after me, he promised. Make sure that nothing bad happened again. I didn’t like his smile.

  It was after the knife attack that I was finally moved from the area to emergency accommodation. I couldn’t give them a description – his face was concealed – but he was strong, he smelled of car oil, and he meant me to die. If my foster-father hadn’t come in the front door, causing the intruder to flee by the back, the knife would have gone in properly, would have punctured my heart.

  ‘Oh Christ, Ava!’ He spilled on to the floor beside me, pressing his hands to my ribs. I wanted to tell him to stop, that it hurt so bad, just to let me bleed, to die, but the air had gone from my lungs.

  I woke in hospital surrounded by doctors and police uniforms. Three days later, I was transferred to a private nursing home. They wouldn’t tell me where it was, and the female detective who’d accompanied me said I’d been registered under a temporary name.

  ‘Temporary?’ I replied, thinking that’s how I’d felt my whole life.

  ‘Until you get a new one. There are people who will help you now.’

  It was lucky, they told me several weeks later, that I didn’t have any family. ‘The witness protection scheme deals with relatives in certain cases, but relocating an entire household has its drawbacks.’

  Mark McCormack looked different every time I saw him. Perhaps it was his job that made him appear as a casual labourer in jeans and check shirt one day, and a businessman in suit and tie the next. He talked me through the whole process.

  ‘You can choose your own name,’ he said. It was the only thing I got to decide.

  I settled on Nina Brookes because it sounded normal, as if the person it belonged to had had a proper start in life; that she might be studying at college, or popular with a group of friends her own age, or learning to drive, or madly in love. It certainly didn’t sound as if she’d been living in a children’s home filled with paedophiles for the last ten years. It didn’t sound, either, as if she had no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

  ‘We’re sending you to Bristol,’ McCormack told me when the trial was underway. ‘It’s a much bigger deal than we ever anticipated.’ He was simplifying things for me, I knew, but I didn’t want to hear the adult truth; didn’t want to know the extent of the horror I’d been living with. ‘You’ll be given a new identity, a new home, enrolled at college if you wish or set up with a job. Funds will be allocated to get you started and I will be checking up on you regularly. I will be your only contact with your old life.’

  I nodded, frowning, contemplating being a naive teenage one moment and an independent woman the next. Mark had taken me to a burger restaurant, not far from the second foster family I’d been sent to. Like the hospital, they’d been given my temporary name, wondered why I didn’t reply straight away when they called me down for food or chatted to me around the dinner table.

  ‘You’ll be moving away in one week.’ He slid some leaflets across the sticky table. ‘College courses,’ he said. He was a kind man, today wearing clothes that suggested he was my dad, even though he wasn’t old enough – a body warmer, a striped shirt, grey trousers. He had stubble. I liked him. ‘I have all the documents you’ll need for a new start. There’s somewhere for you to live, too. The landlady knows you’re coming. She has no idea who you are, what you’ve been through.’

  All this was happening because Betsy was dead; because of one phone call; because I’d told.

  ‘Will I get some new clothes?’ I asked. I flipped through the leaflets and knew immediately what I wanted to study at college. I showed Mark.

  ‘Theatrical make-up it is then,’ he said, as if the rest of my life was unfolding before us – all apart from one small detail. ‘There are certain things I can’t reveal to you about this case, Ava . . . Nina,’ he corrected. ‘I’ve successfully relocated lots of endangered witnesses during my career, but there are several reasons why things go wrong. Every day of your life, I want you to live by two simple rules.’

  I was bracing myself for a lifetime of being hunted.

  ‘Firstly, you must trust no one. Absolutely no one. They come from all walks of life. Last week, for instance, a police officer was arrested.’ He spread his hands incredulously. ‘He was part of that ring, Nina. We know for a fact they haven’t all been caught yet. I am the only person who knows of your new identity. If there is a crisis, it is me you come to. I will give you a telephone numb
er and you must keep it with you at all times.’

  I nodded, shaking from the inside out.

  ‘Secondly,’ Mark continued, ‘you must never, ever return to Roecliffe or its vicinity. Someone will recognise you. Someone will tell someone who will know someone else. You will be in danger immediately. I don’t see any need for you to return there, so keep away.’ He saw my expression, reached a hand across the table. ‘But you’ll be fine. Just live by those rules. Trust no one and don’t go back.’

  I repeated that mantra on the long journey south. I had a suitcase packed with new clothes, and a handbag containing a passport, bank account details, a national insurance number – everything I would need to start again. The only thing Mark McCormack hadn’t done was erase the memories. They were the heaviest part of my luggage as I dragged my new life up the stairs to my bedsit.

  ‘At least I won’t go hungry,’ I said, pointing at the fish and chip shop sign below.

  Pretending to be a father sending his daughter off to college, Mark introduced me to my landlady. He showed me the bus route I’d need to take each morning. Term had already begun but I was slotted into the course with a credible back story. Soon, I’d made a couple of friends; soon Mark’s visits dwindled to every six months until he telephoned to say he wouldn’t be visiting again.

  ‘You have my number,’ he said. ‘Call if you ever need help.’ Trust no one and don’t go back, he repeated before hanging up.

  I felt strangely excited, as if I was stepping onto a West End stage as the leading lady. I could be whoever I wanted and, with every new person I met, I made up a different tale about my past.

  Eventually, Nina Brookes took on a life of her own. Eventually, I found happiness and became Nina Kennedy when I met Mick, the man who was to finally take me away from everything I feared. Never before had I felt so safe, so secure, so certain that nothing would harm me ever again.

  CHAPTER 55

  Nina had never imagined saying goodbye forever. Equally, she’d never once thought that the danger she’d lived with – the same danger that had faded to glorious happiness over the years – would harm anyone’s life but her own.

  If I don’t do this then their lives are over too, she told herself in a moment of doubt. By leaving them, I save them.

  The stage was set. The only thing left to do was die.

  The day was warm, the air thankfully still. As ever these days, Mick had woken with a face lined from broken sleep and stress.

  ‘Juice?’ Nina offered. Mick shook his head, and poured coffee, intending to take it down to the studio.

  The glass skidded across the floor and juice sprayed the room.

  ‘What the . . . ?’ Mick turned abruptly as something flew past his head.

  Nina was red, shaking, crying and kicking the kitchen cupboard as she acted. I’m so sorry, she screamed in her head. ‘I can’t stand this any more,’ she wailed, tearing at her hair, sobbing, gouging at her skin with her nails. Mick tensed, shook his head, and went to the studio.

  Her skin was clammy beneath the wetsuit. She’d changed in public toilets at the edge of a park. The rubbery legs trailed in the disgusting mess on the floor. Her hands shook as she zipped up. Her face shone with sweat.

  Over the top of the wetsuit, she wore a skirt. A special skirt she’d sewn from material Reacher had mentioned was sometimes used in such stunts. It was rigged with parachute cord and two thin flexible poles. If it worked, it might just buy her an ounce more chance; if it didn’t, she wouldn’t be around for regrets anyway.

  She recalled Mick’s story from years ago, about the Victorian woman who had survived a fall from the bridge only because her old-fashioned skirt had saved her. She thought about Ethan Reacher’s advice, the detail he’d gone into about the dos and don’ts of a similar stunt for her make-believe film. She might just have a chance. She had to hurry and catch the tide before it turned.

  Her heart beat an unusual rhythm, stretching the rubber of the suit beneath her top. She bagged the clothes she’d taken off and dumped them in a lay-by rubbish bin. She drove off towards the Clifton suspension bridge without looking back.

  Earlier, Josie had been preparing her things for school, grumpily seeking out games kit that had been scattered around her room during the long summer break. Nina held up an inside-out hockey sock that hadn’t made it into the wash. Silently, Josie snatched it from her mother, and stalked off, rejecting Nina’s embrace.

  Mick was painting, of course, stewing from Nina’s earlier outburst with the glass. The last time she’d seen him was as he disappeared into his studio, as he’d done a thousand times previously.

  She prayed that her behaviour over the last couple of weeks, the harsh words they’d had, the six empty packets of paracetamol she’d left lying on the kitchen worktop, her handbag containing her purse and mobile phone still hanging on the hook in the hall, all pointed to what she needed everyone – including the police, the local papers, Burnett – to believe.

  That she was dead.

  Nina parked on double yellow lines on the approach to the bridge. A dead woman wouldn’t care about getting a ticket. She blanked her mind, knowing that if she stopped to think now, she would never go through with it. She left the keys in the ignition and the car door open, wondering how long it would take before it was stolen. A suicidal woman wouldn’t have had the wherewithal for security.

  Nina ran up to the bridge, her footfalls recognising that each one was a step closer to the finish line. She swallowed, but her throat locked up around a lump of fear. She passed the giant cables that stretched up to the stone towers. Her breathing quickened as she ran over the sandy-coloured stone paving, the spotlights that made a beautiful spectacle at night, the benches where lovers sat to take in the view. On she ran, over the expansion joints and on to the bridge itself, the white lattice railings casting a vague shadow on the paving.

  Up ahead, she saw a woman walking, her hair billowing in the wind. Nina pulled a nose-clip from her pocket, wondering what good it would really do. She couldn’t look down; couldn’t face the brown stretch of flowing water several hundred feet beneath until it wrapped around her body and dragged her under.

  She felt sick from the height.

  Nina forced her legs to carry her along the bridge footpath, approaching the halfway mark. She thought about each present moment – not the one before, not the one ahead. All she could see was the next step in front of her, and all she could hear was the breath she was taking.

  She stopped. She reached for the rail that ran along the white lattice. Glancing up, her body burning from adrenalin, she saw the high stretch of the wires above designed to prevent people doing exactly what she was about to. With immense effort and a strength that she’d not drawn upon for a long time, Nina hauled herself up the lattice and clung on to the wires above.

  Somehow, as others before her had managed, she clambered over. The wire gouged her hands. The metal bruised her shins, her shoulders, her face and neck. She didn’t care.

  A car hooted and someone called out, waving as they sped past. Urging her on.

  Nina stood, her hands gripping the wires, her skirt billowing loose around her legs, and finally she looked down.

  She stared at the rest of her life.

  She knew it would take three seconds to die.

  ‘Wait!’ She heard a cry. Nina looked along the bridge. The woman’s hand was over her mouth, her eyes, even at that distance, clearly bursting with shock. A fat, uniformed man lumbered towards her from behind the woman, screaming and yelling, shouting out.

  Nina looked away. He had told her to do it. He had told her that if she died, he wouldn’t harm the others, that he would leave her family alone.

  She was doing the right thing, wasn’t she?

  ‘Look for the bubbles,’ she whispered. Her final words swept away on the wind.

  ‘It’s pitch black down there,’ Reacher had said. ‘Follow the bubbles to the surface. Then swim for your life,’ he told her, laugh
ing. ‘If you were really going to do it. No one would, though,’ he said. ‘Not without equipment.’

  The river below was as far away as another planet, another life.

  Nina stepped off the bridge.

  She was right. Three seconds to die, yet it took the rest of her life.

  The water sucked her down and everything went black.

  CHAPTER 56

  ‘Adam, Adam! Wake up. It’s me. Frankie.’ My tap soon turns into an urgent thump on the wood. ‘Adam. Open up.’

  I hear a groan. ‘What?’

  ‘Adam, please open the door. I need your help.’

  A moment later, the door pulls back and Adam stands there in tracksuit bottoms. His sandy hair is only slightly more dishevelled than usual, and his top half is naked. He wipes his hands down his face and yawns. ‘What’s wrong?’ He stands aside and lets me in. ‘People will talk, you know,’ he jokes.

  ‘I’m so sorry to wake you.’ I’m shifting about, from one foot to the other. I pull my robe tightly around me. ‘Oh God, please help me, Adam. I’m so worried.’

  ‘Can’t it wait?’ he asks, sitting on the bed. He pulls on a grey T-shirt.

  ‘I need to use your computer. It’s . . . it’s about the girl I told you about. She’s in trouble. Really in trouble. I’m certain of it.’

  ‘Then why don’t you call her mother? It’s hardly your problem, or mine for that matter, at this time of night.’ Adam’s head flops back and hits the pillow. ‘It’s three thirty. And help yourself.’ He waves at the computer.

  I sit at the desk and open up the laptop. In a couple of minutes, I’m logged in to Afterlife. Of course, at this time of night, there’s no sign of Josephine online. As fast as I can, I go into my email folder. I open up a new message and begin to type. She’ll get it next time she logs in.

  To: dramaqueen-jojo

  Subject: Urgent. Pls read!!

  Message: Josie, listen to me. You are in danger and have to get away now. I can’t explain this now. Get to Nat’s house. Call the police. Go as soon as you get this.