The Quiet Girls: An absolutely addictive mystery thriller

by J. M. Hewitt

  ‘Have you got time?’ she asked Ben, made bolder by the liquid fire that burned down her throat.

  He nodded. Alice slipped her shirt off her shoulders and walked over to him.

  Melanie positioned herself behind a huge oak tree and poked her head out to check she had a clear view of the wood store. The mask was still in there, horrible, red and black.

  Somebody very dangerous was out there, and they were on the island with her. It was a man, she deduced, because this very mask had been worn by a man and back then, when it was on his face Melanie had seen his legs and his arm and they were masculine.

  And there were four possibilities.

  Gabe, Lenon, Ben the boatman, and her own father.

  Melanie hung her head. Could she really put her father on that list of potential suspects? It hurt her to, but she couldn’t discount him simply because she loved him, and he was her dad.

  But you know him, a little voice whispered in her head. You know he could never hurt anybody.

  But that wasn’t true, not really. He was on medication and she knew from the list of side effects she’d read that pills could sometimes make people do things that they wouldn’t normally do. Medication could make them angry, or sick, or lower or raise their libido in ways which were unusual. She hadn’t known what that meant when she’d read it, and she’d Googled it later, then wished she hadn’t. But no, she couldn’t discount him. She couldn’t disregard any of them.

  She considered Ben, the sailor, the man who had brought them over on the boat. The man who came to visit and sleep with her mother. Melanie’s lip curled with distaste and she made fists with her hands and held them tight against her head, trying to rid herself of the vision, of the memory. She waited for long moments, crouched in the undergrowth until her mind cleared.

  She would stay here, she had decided. Eventually someone would come along to collect the horrible mask and when they did, Melanie would have her answer.

  ‘You’ll have your answer,’ she said out loud. ‘But then what the hell are you going to do?’

  For that question, Melanie had no reply.

  28

  Carrie had been eager to go, right that very second, but Ben Keller had held up a commanding hand.

  ‘No can do,’ he said. ‘The engine’s been playing up and the boat’s in dry dock just now for checks and maintenance.’

  Carrie had tilted her head. ‘When can we go then?’

  He appeared to have been thinking. ‘In three days,’ he said. ‘I can take you.’

  Now, one day later, and Carrie had watched his little boat as it vanished from the Bridgewater dock, heading, no doubt, to Pomona.

  The sound of running feet, she turned to see Paul, clad in active wear, jogging over to her.

  ‘Got your message,’ he said, leaning over and breathing hard. ‘What’s going on?’

  Briefly she felt bad about calling him on a weekend, but he didn’t seem to mind and, it appeared, he was already in the area.

  ‘I saw Ben Keller’s boat sailing away,’ she said, shading her eyes although the Barnard Castle was long gone. ‘Heading towards Pomona.’ She fixed her gaze on Paul. ‘Even though he said his boat was out of commission until Monday.’

  Paul slumped down on a concrete plinth and massaged his calves. ‘He lied to us. Why?’

  Carrie looked across the water in the direction of Pomona. ‘To warn them?’

  ‘What do you want to do, get another boat? The canal police or the divers’ division?’

  Carrie softened somewhat and forced a brittle smile. ‘It’ll wait until Monday. I’m sorry, you’re not on duty, I shouldn’t have called.’

  ‘It’s no bother, I was here anyway. Had the same thought as you by the looks of it.’ His eyes travelled over her own workout clothes.

  ‘I usually go to the gym, but this is perfect running weather, it’s a pity to waste it.’ She gestured to the cloudy sky before looking back at him. A genuine grin broke out on her face. ‘Want to run with me?’

  He pushed himself upright, his smile matching hers. ‘Do you think you can keep up?’

  ‘Detective Constable Harper!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you even know me at all?’

  She turned, broke into a steady run, heard his yell of surprise, running feet, catching up and settling comfortably beside her.

  After five kilometres they stopped, breathing hard, clinging onto the railings under the Centenary Way Bridge. Silently Carrie stretched, feeling good as the blood pumped around her body.

  ‘Juice?’ panted Paul, gesturing to a pop-up bar under the bridge.

  Carrie nodded and together they made their way over. A cluster of tables, all empty, sat in the sunshine and Carrie pulled five pounds out of her pocket and handed it to Paul.

  ‘Surprise me,’ she said. ‘I’ll get us a table.’

  As she waited, she surveyed the water. A different water to where Ben Keller was headed. And yet again she wondered why he had lied to them.

  ‘I shouldn’t have taken Ben’s word about his boat,’ she said as Paul came back with two plastic cups with straws, and two big glasses of tap water. ‘I should know better by now than to take people at their word.’

  He shrugged as he passed a cup over to her. ‘You had no reason to disbelieve him.’

  Carrie eyed her green, iced drink suspiciously. ‘Wheatgrass,’ said Paul.

  She sipped at it, trying not to wrinkle her nose at the taste. ‘What did you get?’

  ‘Mango,’ he said. ‘Delicious.’

  ‘Swap?’ she asked hopefully, only half-joking.

  In reply, Paul drew his drink closer to himself.

  ‘Did we get anything more about looking into Willow Hadley, anything in her past, reports or allegations she’d made?’

  Paul shook his head. ‘Nothing, not a single thing on any of the family. Nothing on Harry Wilson or his wife or daughter either.’ He took a long sip. ‘So, the mystery caller is Willow.’

  Carrie nodded. ‘That CCTV, it sure matched her.’

  ‘From what we know of her, we’ve only got a photo supplied by her school, and it wasn’t the most recent photo.’

  Carrie suppressed a smile. Paul, the rational to her haste. And it wasn’t a bad thing, it was why they worked so well together.

  She drained her vile drink, washing it down with water, and stood up. ‘Want to go back to the dock, see if our Mr Keller has reappeared yet?’

  Paul tightened his shoelace before standing up. ‘Race you,’ he said with a wicked grin.

  But the spot where Ben’s boat usually stood was still empty. Carrie scanned the shore both up and down river, disappointed.

  ‘Have you ever been to this Pomona?’ she asked Paul.

  ‘No, never. In all honesty I didn’t think you could still access it. I think it used to be open to the public, but the docks have been crumbling away for a while now and it put an end to visitors.’

  ‘Ben knows a way,’ she remarked. ‘I can’t believe he’s the only boatman round these parts who can get us there.’

  ‘Maybe we can find out if it really is as tough a job as he claims,’ said Paul, walking a few yards down the quay to where a small barge was tied up. ‘Excuse me, sir!’

  Now this man did look seasoned, thought Carrie as she regarded the man’s weathered, lined face.

  ‘We were wondering how we could go about getting to Pomona,’ she said. ‘Is it easy to get there?’

  The man’s bottle-green eyes stared at each of them in turn before he broke into wheezy laughter. ‘Whad’ya wanna go there for?’ he asked. ‘S’nowt there anymore.’

  ‘Just for a visit,’ said Carrie. ‘Are there boat trips there, anyone you know of who can take us?’

  The old man slowly shook his head. ‘They closed down the docking bay years ago. It’s nigh on impossible to land anywhere else.’ He narrowed his eyes as them, looking as though he considered the pair to be challenged in their intelligence. ‘Why d’ya think they’ve done nowt with it? Given a b
it of green land someone will build on it, don’t you wonder why they ain’t?’

  ‘You don’t know of anyone who takes their boat there?’ Carrie pressed.

  The man turned back to his barge, climbing aboard with difficulty, his gnarled fingers gripping the rail and he cast the pair one last glance over his shoulder.

  ‘You don’t want to go there,’ he rasped, and then he was gone.

  They hung around the quayside until it got decidedly chilly.

  ‘Guess we’ll have to catch up with Mr Keller on Monday, as planned,’ said Carrie.

  Paul nodded. ‘I’d better head off then,’ he said. ‘But this was good fun, it’s been nice to have a running buddy, maybe we should do it again?’

  He looked anxious, noted Carrie, as though he was overstepping some sort of boundary. She considered her musings the other day, how few people she let into her life, and how she should start to change that. She nodded firmly at him.

  He waved goodbye, and Carrie headed in the opposite direction, eager to get home now the sun had cooled and get in a hot shower. As she passed the old man’s barge her phone vibrated in her pocket.

  ‘DS Flynn,’ she said as she answered.

  ‘Detective Sergeant, this is Ganju, from Eccles,’ he said. ‘Miss Flynn, I found the information on the builder man who decorated my home. I have the paper here, with his details on it.’

  Carrie stopped walking. ‘Are you home now?’ she asked. ‘Can I come and get it?’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ he answered, polite as ever. ‘I will be waiting for you.’

  Carrie hung up and turned around. She saw Paul’s running jacket in the distance, a dot of blue in among all the black coats. She cupped her hands around her mouth.

  ‘PAUL!’ she yelled, and when he turned around she waved her phone in the air. ‘Fancy a drive to Eccles?’

  It wasn’t a business card, as Ganju had originally said. It was a scrap of paper, with untidy writing on it. Not professional, not business-like. Carrie strained to see it; infuriatingly Ganju held it tight, as though worried he would lose the information again.

  ‘My brother told me he was a decorator, this man,’ said Ganju, waving the scrap of paper that he held in his fist. ‘But he wasn’t, not really. He painted, as you can see,’ Ganju swept his hand around the freshly decorated lounge, ‘but it wasn’t his job, wasn’t his business. He’s an odd-job man, so my brother says.’

  Carrie turned to face the man slumped in a chair in a darkened corner of the room. Ganju’s brother, the hot-headed Thaman, looking as furious and edgy as the last time she’d met him.

  ‘We should have done the work ourselves.’ Thaman’s voice rumbled out and he glared at his brother.

  ‘Could we have the details?’ Carrie asked politely, stepping closer to Ganju and the paper he clutched in his hand.

  ‘He seemed all right, when I saw him in the pub. We got talking over a game of darts.’ Thaman mimed throwing a dart, his hand stilled in the air before falling back to clutch the arm of his chair. ‘More fool me. He said he was capable, and his quote was far less than some we’d had. I trusted him to be in my home while I was away, without even knowing him. But he was friendly, normal, you understand?’ Thaman’s eyes flashed, he curled his hand into a fist and thumped his leg. ‘Now we know why he was so cheap, now we know he just wanted a house to bring defenceless, underage girls to where he wouldn’t be disturbed.’ Thaman snarled as he pushed himself out of the chair and snatched the paper out of his brother’s hand. ‘You find this monster, you find him and you lock him up and you tell those people outside that this was nothing to do with us.’

  He leaned close to Carrie. Every instinct told her to back away, but she held her ground, wishing for the armour of her uniform instead of looking like a normal woman in her running gear. She felt Paul’s arm brush hers as he moved closer to her. Instantly she breathed, relaxed, and nodded at Thaman. She held her hand out, her eyes locked on his.

  He pushed the crumpled piece of paper into her palm and she closed her fingers around it, resisting the urge to open it up and read the name of the man which would be written there.

  ‘Thank you,’ she murmured to the brothers’. ‘We’ll get this sorted, I promise.’

  She let Paul drive for once, the folded paper throbbing in her hands. The car pulled away from Ganju’s house, and Carrie smoothed out the paper. She stared down at the cramped, untidy writing, read over and over the name and telephone number and address of the man who had put his hands on the young girl that he had found in the house.

  ‘Oh my god,’ she murmured.

  What?’

  ‘Oh my god,’ Carrie said again, and she leaned her head back against the seat rest. ‘We need to call on Ben Keller, right now.’

  29

  Carrie – 1998

  Life went on.

  It was the general, if unspoken, consensus that Carrie learned. The police and social services visits tailed off, Carrie went back to school and spent the whole day pretending not to notice the stares of the kids and teachers. Previously a high achiever, she lost her ability in lessons, whole hours swallowed up with concern about what she would find when she got home.

  Her mother never returned to her after Hattie vanished. She was there, Mary, in her chair, sometimes, but more often than not in her bed. The pills the doctors had given her lay unopened on her nightstand. The house that Mary had taken such pride in grew dark with dust, the windows lost their shine, became grey pools which one could barely see in or out of.

  Mary was supposed to take Carrie to an appointment every Tuesday after school with a trauma counsellor. The first few times somebody called a Family Liaison Officer took her, until Mary was deemed fit enough to do it herself.

  Mary didn’t take Carrie on that first Tuesday she was supposed to, and Carrie had nobody to tell that she had missed the appointment. She waited for the Liaison Officer or the nice policewoman or the social services lady to telephone or call round so she could bring it to their attention, but no calls came. Nobody visited.

  Carrie and Mary had fallen through the cracks of an overworked system.

  They had a talk at school about ‘stranger danger’. The children sat agog, listening wide eyed as the teacher told them the rules they needed to survive.

  ‘You must not get in the car of somebody you don’t know,’ Miss Graff intoned. ‘You must also not get in the cars of people you do know,’ she went on to emphasise.

  ‘What about if my dad picks me up?’ called out Noah, a boy in Carrie’s class.

  Miss Graff looked confused for a moment before saying sharply, ‘Well that’s okay, he’s your dad.’

  ‘But he’s not allowed to see me, my mum has said that.’ Noah fixed his blue-eyed stare on Miss Graff. ‘She’s got a paper, a r-r-restrained order…’ He stuttered over the legal word.

  Miss Graff sighed. ‘Then no, Noah, you shouldn’t go with your dad if he tries to pick you up.’

  Carrie was as confused as the rest of the kids. She had gone in a car with Mr Lacey, a man she knew, and nothing had happened. But alone in the park with Hattie something had happened, something terrible, but she hadn’t got in a car with the person who had stolen her sister.

  She burned hot with an anger which had no outlet, sitting cross-legged on the cold floor of the assembly hall. These adults didn’t really know what they were talking about, they didn’t have all the answers, they couldn’t protect the kids.

  Carrie stood up. Two hundred little faces turned to watch as she walked out of the hall, out of the school, and went home.

  Nobody stopped her.

  Carrie heard the shallow breathing of her mother as she stood on the landing. Disappointed, Carrie drifted back down the stairs. There would be no dinner served up tonight.

  She dragged a chair into the kitchen from the dining table and looked in the cupboard where the tins were kept. She pulled out a can of beans, the same supper she had made herself for days and weeks. Once they were a treat
. Now, just the thought turned her stomach. She craved something else, something delicious, substantial. Something like chips. Hot with vinegar and salt, where the grease stained her fingers and she sucked at them long after the chips were finished.

  Carrie practically salivated at the thought.

  But Mary’s purse was empty, not even a few pence. Carrie rummaged around the back of the sofa, the place where people always found money, but her hands came out with nothing except a thick coating of dust on her fingers.

  She pulled out the wire vegetable rack. Soft carrots, a single, brown parsnip, and a handful of potatoes. Carrie fingered the white roots of the potatoes before pulling open the pantry and looking at the rarely used deep fat fryer.

  There was smoke first, thick and cloying, and Carrie, unable to reach the top kitchen window even with a chair, opened the back door wide. She flapped with her tea towel, the way she’d seen her mother do on the occasions when something burned under the grill.

  It looked like it was clearing, she thought with relief, as the smoke thinned. She moved away from the door, into the room to figure out how to turn the fryer off.

  A pop, subtle but distinctive, a split second before the flames came.

  Carrie ran to the door and jumped outside, her hands on her face, her mouth open in a scream that wouldn’t come. But her mother was upstairs, the telephone was in the hall, she couldn’t even call 999.

  And Hattie’s pictures, those nonsensical crayon drawings that Mary had pinned up all around the kitchen. They would burn, they would be gone, and they were all that was left of Hattie.

  Her mother would never forgive her.

  Carrie moved to the fence, saw her neighbour’s patio door stood open. She found her scream as she yelled their names, relief as her shout bought their dog running, in turn its barking brought its owners, and Carrie sagged as they saw the plume of smoke pouring out of the kitchen door.