The Mistake

by K. L. Slater

  The detective was very interested in Gareth Farnham. He spoke to Rose in the kitchen, with the door closed.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ he said, pencil poised above his notebook. ‘From the very beginning.’

  So she did.

  ‘I’ve been such a fool,’ she whispered at the end. ‘Everything that’s happened… it’s all my fault. I brought Gareth Farnham into our safe, ordinary lives.’

  ‘You’re wrong, Rose; you’re a victim,’ DCI North tried to reassure her. ‘You’ve been controlled. Groomed.’

  ‘But I chose to stay with him!’ she cried out.

  DCI North pressed his lips together and looked at her. ‘Listen to yourself because it’s right there in your very words. The control. Farnham was good at it, Rose. You didn’t even know it was happening. You thought you had a choice but, in reality, you never did. Think back, even to the small things; somehow you would’ve ended up doing everything he wanted…’

  Rose began to object again and then stopped.

  The ice cream flavour she ate, the film choices; no matter what her initial preference was or how he’d ask for her opinion, they always ended up with Gareth’s recommendation.

  Later, of course, there were no initial choices. Gareth would tell her what would be happening and she’d simply accept it.

  If she didn’t, there would be hell to pay; it just wasn’t worth the fight.

  ‘How could I have been so stupid,’ she whispered, knotting her fingers together. ‘How could I not have seen it?’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up, Rose,’ DCI North said grimly. ‘That’s the nature of control. It’s pervasive; it creeps up on you. Believe me, you are not alone.’

  Yet even as the detective uttered his supportive words, deep inside, Rose still felt as if she was to blame for Gareth’s behaviour.

  She felt responsible for this awful, awful mess.

  All through the early hours the Tinsley family sat silently, wrapped in blankets, staring unseeingly into space.

  As dawn came, a thick wall of silence fell over the house and the street. Then, a noise… a scuffling sound out in the yard. Could it be Billy, found his way home?

  She dashed to the window and looked down on to the dark, still garden. Her heart sank back down.

  ‘Where did you go, Billy?’ Rose whispered, a solitary tear rolling down her swollen face.

  But nobody answered.

  A few hours later, at around seven-thirty, Rose decided to walk over the road to the playing field. She had to get out of the house and away from the oppressive air. She knew she was trying to run away from herself, from her thoughts. Impossible but still… It was raining and dreary and everyone else had had the sense to stay inside, the village search party due to reconvene at 9 a.m.

  Rose yelped and jumped away when a familiar voice spoke behind her, chilling her to the bone.

  ‘Rose, please listen to me. Just give me a couple of minutes to explain.’

  Rose turned away so he couldn’t see her shaking. ‘Go away, or I’ll start screaming, I’ll ring the police.’

  Her breath left her and she gulped in more air. Rapid, shallow inhalations that couldn’t begin to fill her lungs.

  ‘You know I’d never do this.’ Gareth touched her arm from behind and she jumped away. ‘You know I’d never hurt Billy.’

  ‘I don’t know that!’ She whipped round to face him again, heat spiralling up from her solar plexus. ‘You said he was a nuisance. You got so angry with him and hurt him before we split up.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I’d hurt him, Rose!’

  ‘You said Cassie would wish she hadn’t been born and the next day she was attacked. Raped.’ Her eyes darted around the field, across the road, searching for other villagers but there was no-one.

  ‘Is that really what you think of me? After how I’ve loved you, shown you such respect?’

  She shook her head and stared at him incredulously. ‘You are deluded! The things you did to me – the photographs you took and threatened me with…’

  ‘Oh Rose! I never took any photographs. I was just bluffing. You have to believe me.’

  But Rose’s days of believing anything Gareth Farnham said were over.

  She saw, as if for the first time, the lines of discontent between his brows, his worn, grey complexion… but something in his eyes pinned her feet to the floor and she realised he completely believed his own words.

  He really believed that he’d been respectful to her, even after drugging her and keeping her a prisoner!

  At that moment, she felt more afraid than ever and began to walk briskly back towards the street.

  ‘Rose, I need you to do something for me. Please. The bouquet I bought for you and left at the door – I’ve looked everywhere for the receipt. I know the florist gave me one because she handwrote it in front of me but it isn’t in my wallet. I’ve turned the flat upside down and the car. I think I must’ve stuffed it in the bag wrapped around the bottom. I paid cash but it will show I was well out of the area at the time Billy went missing.’

  He wanted her to help him escape arrest, that’s what this was about. He wanted her to help him get away with whatever he’d done with Billy in the same way he’d cleverly convinced her before not to tell the police the comment he made about Cassie wishing she wasn’t born the night before she was attacked.

  ‘I’m not listening to your lies any more. If you really want to help me then tell me what you’ve done with my brother.’

  ‘Rose, please!’ He grasped her arm and she immediately shook him off.

  Silently, the power had shifted between them. Rose thought for a moment about the things Gareth had said and done to her. She thought about the way he’d controlled her, which she’d been unable to grasp until now… until DCI North had made her understand.

  It was as if a veil had been lifted and now everything made sense: each cunning step he’d taken, isolating her from friends and family, domineering her in every way, even when they’d been in bed together.

  And the lies… so many lies.

  ‘Stay away from me, you bastard,’ she hissed.

  His mouth fell open as she turned and walked away.

  She expected him to call her name, to run after her, plead with her – even threaten her to help him escape whatever he’d done to Billy. Anything.

  But he didn’t.

  He never said a word and Rose did not look back.

  When Rose got back to the house, her parents were talking to the police in the living room.

  She stood in the kitchen and looked at the long wooden cupboard in the corner. It was in here that Stella stored all the plastic carrier bags from her trips to the supermarket and from her other purchases.

  It was there Rose would’ve stuffed the bag that had been wrapped around the bottom of Gareth’s dripping bouquet of Stargazer lilies that had been waiting for her when she returned from the abbey.

  She’d initially thought they were from well-wishers until she’d read the small card in Gareth’s handwriting.

  She’d immediately dumped them in the bin outside.

  She’d felt so bad for the flowers; they were dazzling… such incongruous beauty amidst the horror of Billy’s disappearance.

  She did not open the cupboard door to search for the receipt.

  She stood and considered why Gareth’s words were still rattling around in her head.

  She’d always considered herself to be a fair person. A pushover, Cassie would say. But Rose had always tried to see the good in people; it was just in her make-up.

  Unfortunately, she had tried to see the good in Gareth Farnham for far too long.

  It had resulted in her being controlled; some might say brainwashed. Maybe it had resulted in her best friend being brutally attacked… would she ever know the truth?

  Rose shook her head and looked again at the cupboard.

  Periodically, the bags built up and Stella had a good clear out. Perhaps she already had done so and Rose was
too late.

  Regardless, although she didn’t want to believe another word Gareth Farnham said, if she didn’t thoroughly check now she would always wonder. Rose’s hand hovered above the handle.

  Did she want to know? What difference did it make, really?

  55

  SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  Two days after Billy went missing, the village had their major suspect.

  Farnham had something to do with Billy’s disappearance; everyone was saying so. And if she was honest, in her heart, Rose knew it, too. Just as she knew on some level it was no coincidence that Cassie had been attacked after his barbed comments.

  The thought of him doing that… of what happened to Cassie… it made her want to throw up. But she couldn’t think about that at the moment; only Billy filled her head.

  Finding him was all that mattered and she knew Gareth would not tell her anything that could help because all he cared about was himself. He was still trying to enlist her to help prove his innocence when he was clearly as guilty as hell.

  He was currently the major suspect in the investigation. Nottinghamshire Police kept taking him in, questioning him and then letting him go.

  Villagers had reported seeing Gareth with Billy, shaking him, pulling him by the arm in the street when the family thought the child was playing down the field with his schoolmates.

  Rose had spotted the odd bruise on Billy and asked him about it, worried he was being bullied. She’d just not realised a grown man was doing it.

  The last straw for her had been when Gareth had been aggressive with Billy in front of her and she had told the police this. She had also told them about Gareth’s comment about making Cassie’s life a misery.

  She point-blank refused to cover for him any more.

  It was as if Rose had swallowed a phial of truth serum and she could now see Gareth for what he was: sly, conniving, dangerous.

  She couldn’t trust herself when it came to Gareth Farnham. But she could trust others, and everyone she cared about and whose opinion she valued thought the same thing.

  Gareth knew where Billy was.

  She grasped the handle and pulled open the cupboard door. Crouching down, she pulled all the tangled plastic bags out on to the kitchen floor and began sorting through.

  She couldn’t remember the colour or logo on the bag that had contained the flowers. She stuffed all the obvious supermarket ones in a bag and pushed them back into the cupboard. That left about a dozen others.

  Her eyes were drawn to a pink bag with silver writing. She reached for it with a slightly shaking hand.

  The writing read: Simpkin the Florist. She shook out the creases and opened up the top.

  There was a small, handwritten white receipt chit inside. She hesitated and listened to the continuing hum of voices in the other room. Once she was satisfied nobody would be walking in anytime soon, she turned her attention back to the bag.

  With shaking hands Rose smoothed out the receipt on the floor in front of her.

  She ironed it out repeatedly with the edge of her hand, delaying the moment she would need to look at it.

  She scanned down to the bottom of the receipt. It was unusually detailed. The smooth, looped handwriting recorded they were purchased at 3.26 p.m. on the afternoon Billy went missing.

  Rose sat back on her haunches and the receipt slipped from her hands, fluttering in the slight breeze from the open window.

  At this exact time, she and Billy were still flying the kite at the Abbey.

  Gareth had apparently been in Derby – at the florist’s. It would have taken him at least forty minutes to get back to Newstead. Theoretically, he could’ve taken Billy but the timeline would be tight. Very, very tight.

  Of course, that was only if he was telling the truth.

  She wasn’t sure when it had started but Rose became gradually aware that there were hushed voices in pockets all around the house but never in her earshot.

  Any sense of time had long ago slipped through her fingers in this new hell. It was either night or day and that was the extent of her awareness. The knowledge that Billy was still missing was all that filled her head.

  She could hear them now, low, worried voices in the kitchen. She crept halfway down the stairs to listen but still couldn’t decipher any words amongst the low, concerned hum.

  A WPC, Collette, Rose seemed to recall her name was, appeared at the bottom of the stairs.

  ‘Hi Rose—’ her voice sounded too bright ‘—nothing happening down here. Why don’t you just relax in your room a while?’

  Was she serious? Relax?

  ‘Nobody else is relaxing.’ Rose frowned, stomping down the last few steps. ‘What are they talking about in there?’

  The police officer’s eyes darted to the closed kitchen door.

  ‘I’ll ask your mum to pop up to see you shortly, if you like.’

  ‘It’s OK, I’m down here now.’

  Rose pushed open the kitchen door and the low voices immediately stopped. Her parents, DCI North and a couple of the other villagers, all looked at her, their eyes wide.

  ‘Have you found him?’ Rose cried out, her eyes darting to her mother’s pale face. ‘Have you found Billy?’

  ‘No, Rose. We haven’t found Billy yet,’ DCI North said.

  ‘What, then?’ She rushed up to her father, grasped his upper arm and shook it. ‘Tell me, Dad… what’s happened?’

  The room was silent. The air crackled around them as if it were filled with static. Ray Tinsley’s whole body tensed, and then he sighed and his shoulders sagged.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Rose—’ he pulled her close to him ‘—it’s Cassie.’

  56

  SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER

  Afterwards, the only thing she clearly remembered was the primal wailing noise that had filled the room.

  It had begun as a low growl and spiralled into a shrill scream.

  Her mother’s hands had flown up to her ears and her father had stepped away from her, his mouth open and hopeless.

  Rose had crumpled to the floor.

  It was only when she’d begun to sob that the screaming had stopped.

  When Rose woke, the room was bright with beams of sunlight bouncing off the white walls.

  There would be no happy reunion, no holding her friend and remembering the good times together.

  Cassie was dead.

  ‘She just couldn’t cope after the attack, she overdosed on her sedatives,’ her mother had explained. ‘It’s so, so sad but you must focus on getting stronger, Rose. We have to pull together.’

  Why did Rose feel that somehow Cassie dying was her fault?

  Why hadn’t she been more persistent, camping out on the doorstep of Cassie’s house until she agreed to see her, barging past Jed to get upstairs?

  Now Cassie’s entire family was in crisis and the one last thing she could do for her friend – look after her mother and brother – was impossible because she was here.

  Rose’s fingers clawed at the starched, white bed sheet, the guilt growing thick and fast in her mind, as if it sensed the upper hand.

  Why hadn’t she gone with Billy to find his kite?

  ‘Hello, Rose.’ A middle-aged nurse with dark hair pulled back from her round, smiling face appeared next to the bed. ‘I’m Avril.’

  ‘Where am I?’ Rose whispered.

  ‘You’re in Ashfield Community Hospital. You’ve been here three days now but we’re hoping that—’

  ‘Billy,’ Rose croaked, more of a statement than a question. Her throat felt parched and sore but she tried again. ‘Please, tell me… where’s my brother? Where’s Billy?’

  Nurse Avril reached for her hand, squeezed it. ‘I’ll get Dr Chang,’ she said.

  Billy and the kite were up ahead.

  As the kite began to plummet, Rose ran towards it. There was still time, if only she could reach them before…

  ‘Run!’ she told herself. ‘Run!’

  And she did, she ran f
or her life, for Billy’s life. But her legs moved ever-slowly, as if she were running through treacle and, every time she looked ahead, Billy seemed a little further away.

  When she looked down at her bare feet, they were wrapped in thorns and bleeding.

  But she didn’t stop running.

  She never stopped running.

  Voices chipped into her dreams. Sounds that were far away at first and then drew closer.

  Rose opened her eyes. Her parents stood at the end of the bed now with a doctor and nurse.

  ‘Rose!’ Her mother dashed forward and touched her face.

  ‘Nice and relaxed, Mrs Tinsley,’ the doctor said tersely. ‘Hello, Rose. I’m Dr Chang, remember?’

  Rose squeezed her eyes shut to force the memory to appear.

  ‘You… injected me,’ she said accusingly.

  Dr Chang smiled. ‘A little injection, yes. Just to help calm you, Rose.’

  Rose looked at her father, still standing at the bottom of the bed. He looked thinner, weaker. Rose thought he looked… beaten.

  ‘How long have I been here?’ The nurse had said three days when she last woke up but then she’d drifted away again . . .

  She kept her eyes fixed on her father but it was Dr Chang who answered her. ‘You’ve been here about a week now, I think, Rose.’

  ‘Yes.’ Stella nodded, her hand still on Rose’s cheek. ‘Eight days today. They had to sedate you, Rose, you’ve had a… you’re not well—’

  ‘Where’s Billy?’ Rose said quietly, still looking at her father.

  He turned away and looked out of the window. Rose followed his gaze.

  She could see only sky and clouds, no ground. As if they were all in a bubble together, floating in the air, away from reality.

  She knew Billy was gone then, even before her mother told her.

  ‘I want to die too,’ Rose said softly.

  And that’s what she’d tried to do, she thought now, as she sat reading by the open kitchen door.

  Reading helped. At least part of her brain engaged with the story if the book was a good one. She felt safe holding it in her hands, as if it was some sort of good luck amulet.