Sadie was even willing to overlook the fact the baby was the result of a one-night stand between Helen and a lad she didn’t know. In fact his name was Andy and he came from somewhere in the north of England; Eric told Della that Helen had met him in a pub in Mansell one weekend when he was visiting friends but he’d left town without giving her his surname, let alone an address or phone number, and had consequently continued his life unaware he’d fathered a child.
Eric also revealed that Helen had tried her best to be a good mum but it was hard when all her friends were out clubbing every night and she was stuck indoors with a baby. By the time Della was three and a half, Helen was rarely home, disappearing for days on end with no word of her whereabouts. As the rows between Helen and her parents over her neglect of Della worsened, it was almost a relief when, after a week of particularly vicious arguments and shouting, she left again. At first they supposed she’d just gone off with her friends for a few days like she had before, and would turn up when she was ready. But when four weeks passed with no word at all, they contacted the police and a missing person’s investigation began. The police interviewed everyone from Helen’s best friend, Gillian, to the man she bought milk from at the corner shop, and concluded she’d disappeared of her own volition – she had threatened to so many times, after all – and the case was swiftly closed.
The truth had overwhelmed Della. So many lies had been told, so much deceit spun, that it was hard for her to make sense of it. But she understood, even that young, the impact Sadie’s intervention had had. Was it any wonder Helen didn’t want to stick around to see her grow up? She must’ve hated Della for ruining her life.
As Della approached her teens, a sense of abandonment attached to her psyche like her shadow to her feet. Even though Sadie and Eric loved her without question, it wasn’t the same. She’d watch her friends being embraced by their mums and would feel physically sick with longing. Once, when she was twelve, she’d gone to a friend’s house after school and had hurt herself jumping off the top of bunk beds. The mum had given Della a hug to comfort her and she’d held on to her with all her might, breathing in her perfume until she felt dizzy, her body barnacled against the woman’s motherly form. She hated having to let go.
Maggie interrupted her thoughts. She handed Della a business card with a police logo on it.
‘If you remember anything else you think is important, let me know. My number’s on here.’
‘Thank you,’ Della stammered.
She didn’t know what else to say. She fell silent and shifted awkwardly in her seat until salvation came in the form of Sadie’s consultant, who stuck his head round the door and asked if he could interrupt them.
Della rose unsteadily to her feet, not taking her eyes off the doctor’s worn face as he stepped into the room and pulled the door shut behind him.
‘Is she . . . ?’
‘Your grandmother is stable for now,’ he said. ‘She’s suffered acute respiratory failure and we had to perform an emergency tracheotomy.’ He caught Della’s terrified expression. ‘It means we’ve inserted a tube into her throat to create an airway and put her on a ventilator to help her breathe. In a little while we’ll take her for a CT scan so we can see the extent of the damage caused by the blow to the back of her head.’
‘Is she going to get better though?’
The doctor looked grim. ‘It’s too early to say. We’ll need to see how she fares in the next twenty-four hours.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘Yes. It’s fine for you to sit with her now.’
Della expressed her gratitude and the consultant left. She turned to Maggie, who looked like she already knew what she was about to say.
‘I should be with her.’
‘Of course. We can pick this up again later.’
Della felt so guilty at lying to a police officer that a confession formed in the back of her throat, ready to gush forth. She swallowed hard to quash it. Telling Maggie about the photograph meant having to say out loud that she’d been abandoned by her own mum as a child and she’d never admitted that to anyone, not even to Alex. Like her friends, he thought Helen was dead, because that was what she’d told him. Better to let people believe Helen had died than to have them think Della wasn’t loveable enough to make her stick around.
Hardly anyone knew the truth about Della’s past – and that’s the way she wanted it to stay.
7
Sitting cross-legged on the single bed, Bea Dennison gnawed at the hangnail on the side of her thumb until, with a final, painful tug, it came away from its fleshy anchor. A tiny spot of blood appeared in its place so she stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked.
‘You look like a baby,’ Sean admonished from across the bedroom. He was on the carpet, legs splayed open as he counted out ten-pound notes into a pile.
Bea made an exaggerated sucking noise, drawing her thumb into her mouth right up to where the knuckle joined it to her hand. She immediately stopped when she saw Sean’s jaw clench, wiped her thumb on her skirt and drew her legs in until her chin rested on her knees. She felt safest like that, her back pressed against the headboard, legs hugged to her.
‘Right, that’s £120 from what we’ve taken so far,’ said Sean. ‘Not bad.’ He rolled the notes up into a tube and secured it with a thin elastic band, snapping it loudly with obvious satisfaction.
Bea didn’t agree. It was hardly worth what they’d done to get it. It worked out at £30 a house, less than the monthly allowance her parents gave her. But she wouldn’t tell Sean that. If he knew she had her own money he’d want that too.
Silently she watched him open the flimsy pine door to his wardrobe and stuff the roll of notes inside a trainer at the rear, presumably so his dad didn’t find it. Another waste of time in her opinion: Gary Morris never looked up from the television when they came in the flat, let alone ventured anywhere near his son’s room to go searching through his belongings. Bea wasn’t sure he had even registered she was there. If he had, he certainly didn’t care enough to question why Sean was taking a girl obviously below the age of consent into his bedroom for hours at a time.
Her own parents would go ballistic if they knew where she was and what she’d been doing. They thought she’d gone to a friend’s house after school, but the note that Sean had forged for Bea to give to her teacher, saying she had another hospital appointment that day, meant she’d been at his flat since shortly after 9 a.m. She’d had so many hospital appointments over the past two years that none of the school staff bothered to check it was genuine, and because her younger sister’s classroom was in a different building to hers, she never noticed Bea wasn’t around all day either.
Bea hugged her legs tighter and shivered. The flat was so cold it was making her fingers and toes ache but she knew it was pointless asking Sean to put the heating on. He and his dad would rather spend what money they had on takeaways than topping the meter up. They could have insulated the walls with the number of empty pizza boxes stacked up in the kitchen and there was a lingering scent of stale, rotten food throughout the flat.
She steeled herself to tell Sean she had to go home. She could never predict his reaction: sometimes he’d be lovely and would send her off with a hug, reminding her of why she’d liked him in the first place. Typically, though, he sulked and slammed his bedroom door shut as she let herself out the front. Gary, still in the same position he’d been when they’d arrived, ignored the noise.
It was four months since Sean had come into Bea’s life. The first week of the school holidays, she and some friends had gone into Mansell to hang around the shopping centre. At lunchtime they ventured into Subway and that was where she’d clapped eyes on Sean for the first time as he took their order. It was his eyes she’d noticed first: they were a startlingly bright blue, offset by his dark hair and olive skin. Bea thought he was the most gorgeous boy she’d ever seen.
She returned to Subway every day for a week after that. Eventually, with some gigg
ly prompting from his colleagues, Sean twigged that Bea’s repeated visits signalled a crush on him rather than a craving for sandwiches and he asked her to meet him when he finished work the next day.
Bea told her mum she was going to the cinema with a friend. Instead she ended up in a cafe on a back street she’d never been down before – her first proper date. Sean ordered her a coffee at the counter – she didn’t have the courage to say she hated the taste of it – and as they sat down in a booth at the rear of the cafe, Bea fretted about what to say to him without sounding like a silly kid. He was seventeen, only three years older, but he seemed way more mature.
But before she could say a word Sean shocked her by kissing her. It wasn’t the best first kiss – his lips landed only half on hers because she turned her head away in surprise – but it didn’t matter. It was still her first kiss and her insides fizzed as he followed it up with a second that lasted far longer.
It didn’t take long before their differences became apparent though. Sean lived with his dad – his mum had died from cancer two years previously – in a flat they rented in a part of town her parents would be horrified to live in and he’d been in trouble with the police. Her family lived in a four-bedroom semi on a road where all the lawns were landscaped and most of the cars were four-wheel drives.
But when Sean referred to her as his girlfriend within days of their first date, any concerns Bea had melted away. More firsts swiftly followed, some more fun than others. Her first taste of alcohol boosted her confidence and made her feel grown-up around Sean’s mates, who’d dismissed her as a silly little posh girl. When she was drunk she made them laugh. But the first time she and Sean had been alone together in his bedroom she hadn’t enjoyed at all.
‘We need to think about when and where we do the next one,’ Sean said, closing the wardrobe. ‘There’s some sheltered housing near Arnold Avenue, we could give that a go.’
Bea was horrified.
‘You said we were stopping after the last time.’
‘I’ve been thinking about that and it wasn’t that bad. We’ll just have to be more careful.’
‘Careful? You could’ve really hurt her.’
‘I only gave her a slap,’ Sean protested.
He sat on the bed next to Bea and tucked a strand of her blue-black hair behind her ear. Naturally fair, she’d dyed it using a home-colouring kit because Sean thought it would be a good disguise. Her parents went berserk when they saw what she’d done: her mum, Caroline, cried and said she didn’t want to have ‘one of those Emo kids for a daughter’, while her dad, Chris, grounded her for a week. Bea initially railed against the punishment but was then surprised to discover she didn’t miss Sean as much as she thought she would. If anything it was a relief not to have to see him every day and she almost didn’t reply when he texted her demanding to meet when the week was up. The trouble was they’d done two houses by then and she felt she had no choice.
‘Don’t look at me like that, babe,’ said Sean as he caressed her cheek with his thumb pad. Bea fought the urge to pull away. ‘This was your idea, don’t forget.’
Shame flooded through her because she knew he was right. It had been her idea. They’d been watching television in his bedroom one afternoon and Sean was complaining about not earning enough. Flicking through the channels they came across a repeat of an old Nineties police drama and the episode featured some kids carrying out distraction burglaries on old people. Bea made an off-the-cuff, jokey comment – ‘maybe you should turn to crime’ – and that was all it took to set the wheels in motion, spinning so fast she had no idea how to stop them. Before she knew it Sean had bought them both black jeans and black T-shirts from Primark, figuring the less identifiable clothing they wore the better, and after settling on the mugging story as a means of convincing the old people to let them in, began experimenting to see which made the more convincing blood: tomato ketchup or that strawberry syrup you pour over ice cream. The syrup won.
Two days later, a Wednesday afternoon in late August when school was still out and her parents believed she was at her friend Clara’s house for the afternoon, Bea found herself committing an offence that – according to the Internet, because she looked it up – could result in her being locked in juvenile detention for six years. Afterwards she had cried for hours remembering the old woman’s horrified expression when she realized Bea had tricked her way in and that she wasn’t horribly hurt like she’d pretended to be.
But they got away with it and their success – if you could call thirty pounds’ worth of valuables that, which Bea didn’t – convinced Sean they should target someone else. She knew she was an idiot for going along with it, because now she was as guilty as he was. She should have said no. She should have said no to everything.
‘If we do it again, the police will catch us for sure,’ she said, finally pulling away. Her skin where his thumb had touched it itched like mad.
‘I’m not worried about that. Not a single one of those old dears has been able to ID us properly. I’m either really tall or really short with blond hair or black hair and you’ve been either white or Asian. They haven’t got a fucking clue.’
‘That doesn’t mean we should do it again.’
Bea was terrified when she saw reports about the break-ins in the local newspaper, the Mansell Echo. The paper had nicknamed them the ‘Con Couple’, with the police describing them as ‘dangerous individuals’. To keep tabs on the story, Sean had signed up for an email alert from the Echo’s website every time there was a mention.
‘Are you going soft on me?’ he said quietly.
His tone was menacingly calm and Bea shivered, this time from fear.
‘No, I just think it’s too soon. Let’s wait a bit.’
‘You want social services to find out, is that it?’
Bea flinched. It was Sean’s favourite threat – play nicely or I’ll tip off social services about what we’ve been doing and you’ll be taken into care. The first time he’d said it she thought it was a joke. Wouldn’t he get into trouble too, because she was under age? But Sean said he’d tell them she’d lied about how old she was to trick him into sleeping with her and just like that they went from being boyfriend and girlfriend to something horrible and frightening from which Bea could see no escape.
‘No, of course I don’t want that,’ she said in a hollow voice.
‘So it’s settled. We’ll pick a house, then keep an eye on it for a few days before we go in.’
‘I’ve got to go home now,’ said Bea. ‘My mum will be expecting me back from school.’
‘We’ve got time, haven’t we?’ he said, a smile spreading across his face. Bea tensed as he reached for the hem of her shirt, but then she noticed the notification light flashing on his phone, which was on the upturned orange plastic crate he used as a bedside table.
‘It looks like you’ve got a message.’
To her relief, Sean pulled away. As he read it, his face darkened.
‘What the fuck . . .’
‘What is it?’ Bea scrabbled to the side of the bed, ready to take flight.
‘It’s an Echo update. But, but . . . it can’t be right.’ He frowned.
‘What is it?’ Bea was practically shouting now and her heart juddered against her ribs in fear.
‘An old lady was done over this morning and the police are calling it attempted murder,’ said Sean. His breaths were coming fast and Bea could see he was sweating.
‘I don’t get why you’re upset. It wasn’t us.’
‘Because, you fucking idiot, the police think it was.’ He thrust the phone at her and Bea read, open-mouthed, that the police were indeed investigating the strong possibility it was another attack by the ‘Con Couple’, who they were seeking in connection with other distraction burglaries.
‘But we’ve been here all day,’ she cried.
‘No shit. Someone’s copied us and now everyone thinks it’s us. If the old lady dies, we’re fucked.’
; Terrified, Bea burst into tears. ‘I want to go home,’ she sobbed, sounding like the child she was.
‘Shut the fuck up and let me think,’ said Sean. He rubbed his chin as he paced the room. Dark stains spread across the armpits of his red T-shirt; Bea had never seen him so worked up. ‘We need to get rid of the clothes first. I’ll chuck them away or something. Then we need to stop seeing each other for a bit. Put some distance between us. I’ll get my old man to say I was here all day, but you need to find your own alibi. Say you were in town shopping or something.’
Bea’s heart suddenly soared. For weeks she had wanted nothing more than to never see Sean again. Now, at last, she had a reason not to.
8
Maggie’s frustration boiled over as the door to the relatives’ room clicked shut behind Della. She was convinced Della had lied about being unable to describe the missing photograph from memory. But why?
The most obvious reason was that Della had taken the frame herself because she knew its exact value. She wouldn’t be the first person to exploit a burglary by hiding valuable items so a false claim could be made against a home insurance policy. From there it was a leap to wondering whether Della could even have attacked her grandmother herself. She was, after all, Sadie’s sole heir. But as the house was only rented and would revert back to the housing association for someone else to occupy if she died, what else would Della stand to inherit? Maggie also doubted Della had the physical strength to hit Sadie with the bottle. That was some whack to the back of the head.
With a sigh, Maggie pulled her notebook from her bag and recorded as much of her conversation with Della as she could remember verbatim – her notes would need to stand up in court under the scrutiny of a defence barrister. Her lips pursed as she wrote down Della’s comments about Sadie’s wedding and engagement rings. If Della had taken them, their sentimental value must be worthless in her eyes.
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