Blink

by KL Slater

  ‘Is it OK if I just get a glass of water, then?’ I change tack.

  ‘Of course, I’ll get you one.’

  I follow her into the kitchen. We pass the steep, dark stairs on the right and I swear the smell is worse. I hold a tissue up to my face.

  The kitchen is tidy but old and the cupboards are falling to pieces. There is a faint smell of damp. She runs the tap and fills a glass. While her back is turned, I slip a key that is hanging from a hook by the table into my pocket. It looks like a back-door key.

  She turns and hands me the glass.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss, Toni, I am. I don’t know—’

  I don’t answer, I just walk out of the kitchen. She rushes in front of me, shepherding me past the stinking stairs.

  ‘Do you think we could talk?’ she says, her eyes glistening. ‘I’m so sorry for everything. I liked Evie, she was my favourite.’

  I look at her and I think about the kitchen knife I slipped into my bag as insurance. But it’s too soon. If I find out the worst about Evie, then someone is going to pay. I don’t care what they do to me after that, I’ll only want to die myself if I find out she’s gone.

  The only thing keeping me going is the feeling I am getting closer to finding Evie. The police seem to be retracing their steps, regurgitating old investigations that haven’t led anywhere.

  But maybe, just maybe, a different tack could work . . .

  ‘I’ll give you some time to think about things, write down what Joanne Deacon asked you. Try to remember everything you can. And I’ll be back tomorrow evening to talk. It’s the only way we can ever become friends again.’

  ‘Thank you, Toni,’ she says in the horribly vacant manner she now has. ‘I will have a good think.’

  I leave the house and walk up the street. When she can no longer see me from the window, I stand for a moment, leaning on a gate for support, gasping in fresh air.

  She’s hiding something.

  Something terrible has happened in that house and I am going to find out what.

  72

  Present Day

  Toni

  The next morning, I am up early, before Mum is even downstairs. Overnight, I’d been thinking about that smell in Harriet Watson’s house. What if it turned out to be . . . I can’t even think the words. Would I be strong enough to face the worst?

  I close my eyes against the horror of my wild imagination.

  I ring DI Manvers. To my surprise he picks up right away. I quickly tell him about visiting Harriet Watson and about the smell.

  ‘Toni, please, I need you to listen to me very carefully,’ he says firmly. ‘Leave it to us. Do you understand me?’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say.’ My stomach twists. ‘You haven’t done anything to find Evie for the last three years.’

  It was unfair, I know that.

  ‘We’re doing everything we can, Toni,’ he says. ‘I promise you.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I can’t divulge every single action, but I will let you know if our lines of inquiry lead to new information.’

  That stupid fucking jargon again.

  ‘Is Harriet Watson a suspect?’

  ‘Again, I’m not able to say, Toni. I’ll pop over and see you tomorrow. How’s that?’

  I put the phone down without answering. He’s taking me for a fool; underneath, he blames me, just like the media. They’ll never find Evie, they’re moving too slowly and they think she’s already dead.

  I’m not going to wait for them to help me anymore. From this moment forward, I will only rely on my own gut instincts.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ Mum demands when she comes downstairs. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about, Mum.’

  I feel energised for the first time in years. I feel close . . . close to finding out the truth about Evie. Good or bad, I have to know.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, I am waiting at the end of Harriet Watson’s street, the opposite end to the bus stop. At nine o’clock, she comes out of her gate and walks down to the bottom end of the road.

  I don’t wait until she’s out of sight, I don’t have time. Evie could be upstairs, being held prisoner in that house – or, judging by that smell, even worse.

  The police haven’t been round here in years. They’d believed all the lies Harriet had fed them, dismissed her as some kind of harmless loon.

  I hurry through the gate and walk quickly around to the back of the house. There’s quite a large garden at the back and the house itself is tall – three stories high. I slip the key I took yesterday into the back door. The lock is greased and turns easily. I open the door and step inside the kitchen.

  I gag when I reach the stairs and get the first strong waft of the smell, but I have one of Mum’s scented hankies in my hand and I hold it up to my nose and breathe through my mouth. I climb the stairs up to the second floor. The smell grows stronger.

  I take a quick look in the two bedrooms. The bed is unmade in the double room overlooking the road, obviously where Harriet slept last night. The other bedroom is unused; the bed has a fitted sheet on it but no quilt.

  I come out of the second bedroom and look at the second set of steep stairs, which lead up to the third floor.

  I press the hankie closer to my nostrils and climb the stairs quickly.

  There is a small bookcase on the square landing at the top and just one other door. I try the handle and find it is locked.

  The smell is unbearable. I think about going downstairs and ringing the police. But they’ll only tell me to leave and wait for them outside, and I have to know.

  I have to know right now if my daughter is in there.

  I refuse to be apart from her for another second.

  73

  Present Day

  The Teacher

  Harriet waits in the hospital reception area until five minutes before the start of visiting time. Then she joins the droves of people swarming towards the lifts and stairs. Thanks to her ‘dry run’ visit the day before, she knows exactly where she is going. Joanne Deacon has been moved, apparently, to a stroke recovery ward. Less intense monitoring and more accessible for visits.

  When Harriet arrives at the entrance of the ward, there is already a small group of people waiting to be allowed through the secure doors. Harriet tucks in behind an old lady and her grandson. The buzzer sounds and someone pulls open the doors. Harriet looks up just as a woman strides out of the ward, busy tapping on her phone. Too busy to notice Harriet’s mouth drop open as she stares at her.

  It’s her. The woman she’d seen Joanne Deacon talking to several times outside the school.

  Harriet had completely forgotten about it until now.

  There had been another woman.

  * * *

  As Harriet had hoped, the ward station is chaos, the nurses running to and fro or caught up talking to relatives and giving progress reports. Harriet spots a young nurse looking nervous and inexperienced, standing back from everyone else.

  ‘I wonder if you could help me, dear.’ Harriet smiles, affecting a harmless façade. ‘I’m looking for my cousin, Joanne Deacon. She’s just been moved here, apparently.’

  The nurse smiles and glances at the clipboard in her hand, apparently pleased to be asked something she can actually help with.

  ‘She’s in her own room at the end here. It says here access is strictly for family or the police.’ The nurse glances at Harriet, seemingly taking in her benign appearance and pleasant smile. Satisfied, she nods. ‘I’ll take you to her.’

  Harriet takes full advantage of the short journey across the main ward.

  ‘I understand she can’t move. Paralysed, they told me,’ Harriet says, remembering what the newspaper article had relayed.

  ‘Oh, haven’t they told you? Your cousin blinked at a nurse. It’s the first sign that her movement is returning.’ She smiles at Harriet. ‘The doctors have moved her here for recovery now t
hey know she isn’t in a vegetative state as they first assumed.’

  The young woman seems completely unaware of the controversy surrounding Joanne Deacon or the recent newspaper coverage. Harriet can’t believe her luck, the ease of access she’s been given to such a high-profile patient.

  How long such access might last is another matter, though, thinks Harriet. She can reasonably expect intervention from a senior member of staff very soon, once they realise the young nurse’s mistake.

  She enters the room. It’s quiet, away from the busy drag of the main ward.

  Harriet walks over to the bed and hovers above Joanne Deacon’s face. The patient is pasty, marked by red welts left here and there by the respirator’s different positions. Puffy and slightly swollen, her features look different to how Harriet remembers.

  ‘Remember me?’ Harriet says, staring down at the staring, unmoving eyes.

  Joanne Deacon blinks. Twice.

  ‘They say you’re beginning to recover. Even though you did the most terrible thing, you’re getting better.’

  The eyes stare up at her. Harriet glances at the door and looks back down.

  ‘You lied to me. You made a fool of me. I lost my job and my reputation.’ Harriet picks up a pillow from the chair at the side of the bed. Joanne Deacon blinks again. ‘It’s time to pay for what you did.’

  Harriet reaches for the respirator mask and pulls hard.

  74

  Present Day

  Toni

  The door at the top of Harriet’s third-floor stairs might be locked but it seems quite flimsy. If I kick hard at it, I might be able to break it down. I’m just about to try that when I hear a noise downstairs. I freeze and listen.

  Is Harriet back already?

  I hear a banging, then a crashing noise as something is knocked over. I creep back down the stairs and wait on the second-floor landing. I think I hear a whispered voice but I’m not sure. I thought I’d locked the back door behind me . . . but now I can’t remember.

  ‘Hello, Toni,’ a woman’s voice says clearly. It sounds familiar.

  I move to the top of the stairs. My eyes widen. I begin to descend the stairs, unable to process who I’m seeing, how this makes sense.

  ‘Tara?’

  There is a man with her. ‘What are you doing here, I mean . . .’

  She looks strong, healthy. Her fair hair is long and dark now. The expression on her face is . . . strange.

  ‘Come downstairs, Toni,’ she says. ‘We’ve something important to tell you.’

  I begin the descent. ‘How did you get in here? How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘We’ve been watching you,’ says the man, smiling. ‘For weeks.’

  I follow them down to the ground floor, too confused to ask anything. When I finally reach the bottom of the stairs, my heart thudding so hard it makes me feel faint, he steamrollers me into the living room and closes the door behind the three of us. He stands, arms folded, blocking my exit.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I turn to my friend. ‘Tara, what’s happening here?’

  ‘They’ve found her, Toni. They’ve found Evie.’

  I stagger back and hold on to the edge of the rough, worn wing of one of Harriet’s armchairs.

  ‘They’ve found her?’ I say faintly. ‘Is she . . .’

  ‘I suppose I should say that we let them find her. I’ve had my fun, but yes, she’s fine. She’s a delightful girl and you don’t deserve her, you never have. She needs a decent family who’ll take care of her.’

  I feel dizzy. Sick.

  ‘I don’t understand . . .’

  ‘I’ve had Evie, all this time,’ Tara says lightly. ‘We’ve kept her in a little cottage in the remote Highlands. She’s a delight. You neglected her, and you made it so easy for me to take her.’

  I rub my forehead, trying to understand. ‘You’ve had Evie all this time? But why?’

  Our telephone conversations echo in my mind. All the tears we’d shed together about our husbands, about Evie.

  ‘Why should you get to make a fresh start in life when it was your husband who killed mine? I lost my baby too, you know.’

  ‘Yes, I know that, Tara. I’m so sorry for your loss, but—’

  ‘But nothing. I didn’t hear from you for months and months. God, this place stinks.’

  ‘I was grieving, just like you! I sent you a card and—’

  ‘A card? A fucking card for the loss of my husband and unborn child?’ Her eyes grow wild. The man touches her arm and she takes a deep breath. ‘I got to thinking, how can you get revenge on a dead man who ruined your life?’ She smiles to herself. ‘And the answer came to me. By taking his only child. Phil and I can’t have children so I got to thinking it’s like beautiful poetic justice, almost.’

  She has a manic, crazed look about her.

  I turn to the man. He’s tall and broad, athletic looking, but his eyes are cold.

  ‘I worked with Andrew, I was there that night he led us off the cliff.’ He holds up a mangled hand. ‘Some of us challenged his directions, but he was a stubborn bastard, wasn’t having it. Fortunately, I came off fairly unscathed. Apart from losing my career, that is.’

  ‘But Tara, your health, you said—’

  ‘You’re so gullible. I was never ill, never had MS. I just needed a reason not to visit you. I loved our telephone calls, when you’d tell me how awful your life was. And then to listen to your suffering after I took her, well, that was pure heaven. You were so selfish, all you wanted to talk about was your own pain.’

  ‘You’re sick, I mean really sick in the head.’

  ‘Maybe. But I’m clever. I’ve been watching you for a long time. We watched you and followed you here.’ She turns to Phil. ‘Can’t you open a window or something? It’s making me retch in here.’

  He doesn’t respond.

  ‘Watching me?’ I repeat.

  ‘You’re clueless. I watched you from across the road in a house I rented in Muriel Crescent. I even followed you to work. We followed you here. Watching you, watching Evie. Phil took all your photo albums and Evie’s birth certificate from your bedroom so we had evidence she was ours if we needed it. You were so out of it, you never even realised anything was missing.’

  I think about that day I’d entered my bedroom and just felt inexplicably that something was wrong. The bin bags full of stuff had been open but I thought it was just my imagination.

  ‘Phil’s a military man, an expert. He documents every detail so there are no mistakes.’ She turns to him and smiles, in her stride now. ‘He even planned your mother’s demise. That was a stroke of genius, as it turned out.’

  I think about Mum’s distress about her accident on the stairs. How she thought she was losing her mind.

  ‘I was waiting for my chance, I just didn’t know how I’d do it. You getting the Gregory’s job was perfect, Joanne Deacon was a gift. On the verge of bankruptcy and desperate for cash, she gave me a way in. In time, I knew your routines better than you did. We wanted your interfering mother off the scene and that’s why Phil planned the accident, but, as it happened, you made such a mess of everything that the incident led to our chance to take Evie.’

  ‘I thought Jo was my friend.’ I have to say it out loud, to make it count for something.

  ‘You’re a bad judge of character then,’ Tara sniggers. ‘Although she did start to get cold feet once she’d taken her. I think she actually believed us when we said we were just teaching you a temporary lesson, that we’d return Evie to you. We had to snatch her back from Jo pretty quickly, she seemed to think Evie belonged to her.’

  ‘Evie,’ I whisper. ‘I want to see her.’

  ‘She’s safe. I’ll tell you that as my parting gift. But you can’t see her; you’ll never see her again. Just like I never got to see my baby. You see, Phil here is quite the expert at making death look like a beautiful accident.’

  ‘Tara, why? Why do all this now?’

  ‘Because this e
nding is just perfect. They’ve got Evie back, so the heat is off us, but I’ve got you. So, you see, you’ll never get to see each other. Two lives ruined for the price of one.’

  ‘You’ll never get away with it, not now you’ve come back.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be so sure. They haven’t found us so far. We had to practically deliver little Evie right into their hands, they’re so incompetent.’

  ‘So why did you bring her back?’

  ‘Things were hotting up. Haven’t you seen the national newspapers this morning? That stupid bitch Jo Deacon, getting herself a nice little paralysing syndrome instead of just dying when she had the stroke.’ Her face contorted. ‘They’re interested again, the police will be stepping up their inquiries. I’ve got my revenge, now I’m ready to start a new life and there’s just one last thing to do.’

  Phil takes a step towards me.

  ‘Joanne Deacon will never make a full recovery, even if she has blinked. I’ve been to the hospital, spoken to the doctors. We always used fake names with Evie, told her we were her aunt and uncle. She loves us, won’t betray us, because she knows nothing. Police resources won’t stretch to a national manhunt for a child that’s returned unharmed.’

  She hands Phil a bottle.

  ‘Make her a nice cup of tea, Phil, and put plenty of this in.’ She smiles at me. ‘It’s time to end it all, Toni.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you—’

  ‘That’s just it. You never tried to understand my pain, you were so involved in your own suffering.’

  ‘Tara, I couldn’t function, please. Let’s just talk about what happened, about Evie.’

  ‘None of your clever tricks,’ she snaps, as Phil comes back into the room. ‘We’re not here to talk. You can either drink this or I’ll force you. It’ll only take a few sips.’

  She takes the mug from him and he holds my arms behind my back in a lock. My back arches, my face tips back. She pours the tea and I seal my mouth shut as the burning fluid scorches my skin.