Two Little Girls: A totally gripping psychological thriller with a twist

by Frances Vick

  Peg Leaves lived – inevitably – at the Beacon Hill estate. She was a legend, a landmark. She and her large, fluctuating family had great (and misplaced) faith in their Rights as Taxpayers – ironic given that very few members of this murky clan had ever held down a legal, taxable job. They Called a Spade a Spade and Minded Their Own Business and Looked After Their Own, but they couldn’t survive without Peg, and they knew it. Peg was the one who possessed enough social savvy to heal rifts with the neighbours, bend recalcitrant head teachers to her will, stave off the bailiffs for another week or so. Peg was the receptacle of family lore, tradition, the font of all memory and wisdom. Her face was a relief map of a hard and humorous life, her hair still dyed a defiant yellow, and on each finger a ring or two dug down deep into the flesh. She was indestructible. But she wasn’t looking indestructible any more… Years of bad food, smoking and almost professional indolence had left her with diabetes, blood clots, swollen legs, and locked, painful joints, all of which she’d done nothing about because she didn’t like doctors. None of them did, the entire Leaves family distrusted hospitals on general principle, but this time they had to go against their nature and relinquish Peg to the tender mercies of the NHS, which they did with truculence and bad grace, assuming that she’d be fine in a day or two. The hospital might have Peg now, they told each other, but they weren’t going to keep her. As soon as they could they’d pull her from the mouth of the State and bring her back home where she belonged.

  But Peg was sicker than they’d thought, and scared too. Her fear scared the family further, and they coalesced into a small, charging army, fearless and savage, with Mona – Peg’s daughter – leading the charge. When the hospital told Mona that Peg was too sick to go home, Mona hissed, spat, cajoled and whined until the whole family were threatened with being barred from visiting altogether. They retreated, but since then, the family’s relative quiet had been unnerving. The general suspicion in the hospital was that the family would try to sneak Peg out of the door, regardless of how ill she was, setting the scene for a pitched battle with wider Social Services – a siege of the sort the whole clan enjoyed, and the hospital couldn’t afford to fight. Their only gambit was Kirsty; she seemed to have the ability to calm any situation down. She was their master negotiator in situations like this, their trump card.

  Peg let it be known from the start that she liked Kirsty, going so far as to say that she ‘had a good head on her shoulders’ and this, for the rest of the clan, was tantamount to a papal blessing. Thanks to Kirsty’s hard work, Mona was beginning to accept that there was no way Peg could go home without proper support. Then the consultant met with the family and erased all that careful work with one breezy command: the house had to be inspected, Mona must install handles on the walls, a commode and bed downstairs, and work out some way of getting a wheelchair in and out of the front door, and to do that, she had to let people in. Strangers. Officials. This was the sticking point for Mona. Her world was her family, and everyone outside the family was not to be trusted. She wanted Respect. Her mum deserved Dignity. The consultant doctor pointed out that there wasn’t a great deal of dignity in not being able to walk, defecate or eat without help, and this had landed very badly with Mona, who backtracked to her earlier threats to get Peg out by force. The consultant unhelpfully countered with references to police injunctions, and Mona hit the roof.

  They called Kirsty back in immediately.

  Peg Leaves was the kind of woman Kirsty enjoyed. Like Sarah, Peg was a strong, no-nonsense lady with a foul mouth and a froggy, self-deprecating laugh. She was also, once she was forced into it, a realist. She knew she couldn’t leave hospital yet. It was her daughter, that was all.

  ‘She’s forty years old and she can’t do without her mum. Daft cow, in’t she?’ The stroke had muddied her voice, thickened her tongue.

  ‘How can we make her understand?’ Kirsty asked. ‘You’re going to need a lot of help, and she obviously wants to do it, but I’m not sure if she understands—’

  ‘That she’s going to have to wipe my arse?’ Peg smirked. ‘No. She’s not good at that. Four kids she’s had and I did most of the nappies.’

  ‘It’s the house too, though. Where is it you live again?’ Kirsty felt her old accent slip back. ‘Victory Road?’

  ‘Yeah, Beacon Hill,’ Peg affirmed.

  ‘Would it help if I went over there to see her?’

  ‘She won’t let you in. I’ll talk to her.’ Peg looked tired now. She tried too hard to seem well. Kirsty patted her hand, and was about to leave when Peg suddenly opened her eyes wide. ‘I know your face,’ she muttered.

  Oh god, was she having another stroke?

  ‘Yes, I’m your social worker, Peg. We meet every day—’

  Peg’s tired eyes expressed irritation. ‘No. No, I’m not daft, I know that. I mean, I know your face from before. Can’t place it though.’ Her dim eyes searched her face, her mouth puckered. ‘You’re… Denise’s girl?’ A dim, frightened confusion ripped over her face. ‘No. No you can’t be, she’s dead, isn’t she? Isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kirsty managed. ‘But I knew Lisa. Maybe that’s why you remember me.’

  ‘That poor little cow. Nearly thirty years now,’ Peg murmured.

  ‘Did you know Lisa?’

  Peg blinked slowly. ‘Not many people I don’t know.’

  ‘Who do you think killed her?’ The words were out of Kirsty’s mouth before she knew it. They shocked her. It hadn’t even been on her mind to ask that question.

  Peg turned shrewd eyes on her. ‘So you don’t think it was the coloured feller either?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kirsty said, ignoring the ‘coloured feller’ remark.

  Peg’s eyes were closing. ‘Thirty years. Lot of stuff comes out after thirty years, doesn’t it? It all comes out.’ And then she was asleep.

  A text from Vic.

  Reminder to RSVP to our Housewarming! This Saturday from 3, little kids welcome, big kids: Put on Your Dancing Shoes!!

  This was followed by another, not from a mailing list.

  Hun BIG surprise @ party! Angela (B) is in UK!!!!!! & has DEFINITELY agreed to come & do cleansing ceremony (2 houses + barn = sooooo many unhappy spirits). SO excited can you come early to help set up?

  This Saturday. This Saturday would be the thirtieth anniversary of Lisa’s disappearance. Strange that that hadn’t registered before… strange that it did now. Kirsty felt suddenly very tired, bone tired, as Sarah used to say. She knew she should text back immediately or Vic would be put out. She knew she should make absolutely sure that Lee was going to come, otherwise the party would be unbearable. She didn’t do either of those things though. Instead she felt her fingers stretch to her keyboard, tap with a sure touch, as if autonomous.

  Lisa Cook anniversary. Click.

  The first thing she saw was Bryan.

  Click.

  Thirteen

  THREE DECADES ON

  * * *

  Who killed Lisa Cook? We look at the murder mystery that shocked Britain on the thirtieth anniversary of the little girl’s disappearance.

  * * *

  THREE decades after schoolgirl Lisa Cook went missing, lawyers for her killer are calling for the case to be reopened.

  * * *

  Suspect ‘made false confession’. Body never found. Investigation ‘flawed’.

  * * *

  On 29th March 1985, the bright ten-year-old’s life changed forever as she walked home from school.

  Toqueer Mohammed Al-Balushi, an Omani student who lodged with Lisa’s family, soon confessed to her murder, but experts say the evidence is sketchy, the investigation was flawed, and Al-Balushi’s confession was coerced.

  Over the decades, armchair sleuths have picked over the case, but have continued to draw blanks. Now, Toqueer Mohammed Al-Balushi’s legal team have demanded that the case be reopened, claiming that Lisa’s killer may still be at large.

  * * *

  Life without
Lisa: Legacy of a child murder

  * * *

  Bryan Cook’s features soften when he looks at the two photos he carries with him everywhere.

  ‘I look at Lisa, and I look at my daughter,’ he says, ‘and in her I see the woman Lisa might have become.’ He pauses, to wipe his eyes. ‘And she’s so much like Lisa. Same blue eyes, same feisty temper. It’s almost as if God gave us a little bit of her back to us.’

  That day, little Lisa Cook left school at the usual time. She never arrived home. Bryan, then sixteen, and living away from the family, didn’t know his sister was missing until the next day.

  ‘I came over on Saturday morning to help my stepfather, Stuart, pack the car for a car boot sale. When I got there, he asked if I’d brought Lisa with me.’ Bryan shakes his head at the memory. ‘Apparently she’d told them she was going to stay at mine and they’d believed her. When I told them I hadn’t seen her, we all began to panic.’

  Bryan’s final memory of his sister is of her on the morning she disappeared.

  ‘I used to live near the school, and I saw her hanging around the gate with her friends in the morning, talking about the school disco. She wanted to go, but she didn’t have the outfit she wanted. She asked me if I’d talk Mum round into buying it for her. I remember I teased her, saying she could sell off some of her Care Bears if she wanted money that badly, and she got really angry with me!’ His eyes twinkle again, with fond sadness. ‘That was Lisa, she wanted to be a grown-up even though she was still a kid.’

  Bryan, together with his mother Denise, and Stuart Brammer – her second husband – went searching for Lisa around their estate.

  ‘In those days nobody had a mobile phone. Mum didn’t even have a landline, so even if we’d had their numbers, we couldn’t call around Lisa’s friends to see if she was with any of them. All we could do was look for her.’

  As darkness fell they were joined by neighbours, friends and eventually the police. Frantically they searched back alleys, garages and sheds.

  ‘I shouted myself hoarse,’ Bryan remembers of that first night. ‘When we had to stop the search, I went back to the house with Mum, and she was absolutely hysterical. She held one of Lisa’s dolls and kept saying, “She’s never going to come home, is she?” and I tried to reassure her, but somehow, then, I knew that what she was saying was true.’

  In the chaos and emotion of that night, no-one noticed that there was one other person missing from the Cook household. Two young students from Oman – Mohammed Oman and Toqueer Mohammed Al-Balushi, known to the family as Mo and Tokki – had recently begun lodging with the family, taking Bryan’s old bedroom. Mohammed Oman was present and helped with the search, but Al-Balushi claimed to have stayed on at Marlborough House – the English school both attended – to worship privately in the prayer room. He never came back to the home.

  At the mention of Al-Balushi, Bryan’s face darkens. ‘I never liked him,’ he admits. ‘As soon as I met him, I had a bad feeling about him. Mohammed would smile, look you in the eyes at least, but the other one seemed very stand-offish. I remember he said he couldn’t use the same bathroom as a woman, so he had to shower at the sports centre in town. I asked Mum why he took the room knowing that there were two females living in the house, and she told me that they wanted to live with a family, because they were so far from home.’

  Still though, Denise Cook refused to believe that Al-Balushi might have something to do with her daughter’s disappearance. ‘She told me that he called her “Mum”,’ Bryan says grimly. ‘She treated them like her own sons. There was no way she’d ever suspect either one of them.’

  But Bryan did. Frustrated with the search, he spoke to Lisa’s friend, Kirsty Cooper. What she told him was shocking.

  Bryan’s voice throbs with pain. ‘Tokki had been abusing Lisa. He told her they were married, and Lisa believed him. She thought she was grown up, but she was just a little girl. She thought what he was doing was normal. As soon as I heard what had been happening, I went straight to the police.’

  Nevertheless, it was another full twenty-four hours before Kirsty Cooper was interviewed. Does Bryan still bear the police a grudge?

  ‘I do,’ he whispers. ‘It was nearly forty-eight hours after Lisa disappeared before they got round to talking to the last person to see her – Kirsty. If they’d spoken to her sooner, she could have told them about the abuse, and maybe Lisa would still be with us. Maybe Kirsty knew more than she told them, too. I tried my best, but I was sixteen years old, and doing their job for them. And, because I was a bit of a tearaway in those days, they didn’t take me seriously. They left it too long – by the time they spoke to her, Tokki was long gone.’

  Al-Balushi was found days later in London city centre, by a member of the public who recognised his face from the news. ‘Even then it was an ordinary person like you or me that found him, not the police, even though they’re trained to!’ Bryan says.

  Despite confessing to the murder of the little girl, Al-Balushi later claimed that he didn’t understand the questions, and believed he was arrested for a minor visa violation.

  ‘As soon as he was caught he tried to wiggle out of it.’ Bryan’s eyes blaze with anger. ‘It didn’t work, but he’s still sitting pretty in prison, he gets his halal meals specially made for him. He won’t even tell us where he put my sister’s body, so she can have a decent Christian burial. We’re left in limbo. Where’s the respect?’

  Shortly before his death in 1990, Lisa’s estranged father Pete told the Daily Mail that he felt unable to properly grieve for his daughter, since her body has never been found. Does Bryan feel the same way?

  He nods. ‘It’s hard to grieve because even now, there’s a tiny little bit of me that hopes she’s alive somewhere. Dad died hoping that we were going to find out what actually happened to Lisa and to rule out once and for all that she is alive somewhere. He even asked to visit Tokki in prison to see if he’d tell him the truth face to face, but Tokki refused to meet with him,’ claims Bryan.

  And Denise?

  Bryan’s voice is husky with pride. ‘Mum is a trooper. She’s very strong, very private, and she’ll never let anyone see her fall.’ Once more he fingers Lisa’s photograph. ‘And, like me, she won’t give up on the truth.’

  * * *

  Timeline of Lisa’s disappearance

  * * *

  29th March 1985

  * * *

  Lisa Cook doesn’t come home from school. Her family and neighbours search the area, but the police don’t launch an investigation for another two days.

  * * *

  31st March 1985

  * * *

  Kirsty Cooper is questioned at the police station, with no parent present. In a series of taped interviews she tells officers that Lisa had ‘married’ Al-Balushi in a ‘special ceremony’ and was going to live in Oman and be a princess.

  Police visit the Cook family home to speak to Al-Balushi, but are told he left the home on Friday morning and hasn’t been seen since. The police put out an appeal to find him.

  * * *

  3rd April 1984

  * * *

  Kirsty Cooper’s name is leaked to the local press. Police deny that she is being questioned, but put a police guard outside her house, leading to a media circus. An unnamed source gives the press details of Kirsty’s evidence. Kirsty claims that Lisa suffered sexual abuse at the hands of Al-Balushi, and that she herself was being ‘groomed’ by his friend and fellow lodger Mohammed Oman. She further claims that both men visited the girls’ school on at least one occasion.

  * * *

  7th April 1985

  * * *

  Toqueer Mohammed Al-Balushi is found ‘in a distressed state’ at King’s Cross station. A member of the public takes him to the police station. Al-Balushi is questioned by police, with no legal representation and no translator. Six hours later he confesses to Lisa’s murder, but claims to have forgotten where her body is.

  * * *

 
9th April 1985

  * * *

  Al-Balushi takes back his confessions and denies murder.

  * * *

  30th June 1985

  * * *

  The language school attended by Al-Balushi and Oman is gutted by fire. Two teachers and fourteen students are treated for burns and smoke inhalation. The fire is judged to have been a deliberate arson attack.

  * * *

  29th March 1995

  * * *

  As the investigation fails to bring up any credible leads, Lisa Cook is officially declared dead.

  Kirsty looked at Bryan’s mournful face staring out of the screen. She wouldn’t have recognised him… the years hadn’t been kind. The Bryan she remembered was scrawny, sharp-featured, and his eyes peered bright and stupid from sunken pools of sleepless brown. This Bryan’s face was two faces; the first lost in a nimbus of fat, the second falling in tallow-like wattles into a slovenly neck. His eyes were still the same though – watchful within worn sockets, but that gleam of evil animal intelligence wasn’t there any more.