Unfortunately, Harry didn’t live there at the moment.
After his brush with a train – and having been released from hospital with an arm and a leg in plaster – Harry had been forced to move back in with his mum in the small Tarnsey terraced house which he had grown up in. This was where Nick Crane was heading.
Mrs Wollers opened the door and led Crane up the narrow staircase and along the landing. The tall policeman almost looked too big for the little house. He was shown into a bedroom at the end, and saw Harry Wollers lying in a single bed under a chequered-flag duvet which probably dated from his pre-teenage years. Posters of supermodels and footballers lined the walls, and tinny music was blaring from a small stereo on the windowsill.
Crane grinned at Harry, who looked bored out of his brain:
“Alright mate?” he asked.
“Back with more bloody grapes, are you?” Harry replied.
“Nah. Was going to get you some strawberries...”
“Oh. Well, where are they?” asked Harry.
“Out of season now” replied Crane.
“Great. What have you got then?” asked Harry.
“Nothing. Well, not exactly nothing: I’ve got some news. Nothing you can eat though.”
“Suppose that’ll have to do” smiled Harry, “what’s up then boss? I’ve not seen any news today. I’m a bit out of the loop in this place.”
“Ricky James has been arrested.”
“Seriously? What for?”
“Three murders.”
“Murders?” Wollers sat up in bed, an action which seemed to cause him a certain amount of pain. He grimaced and rubbed his broken shoulder with his good hand:
“What about his alibis?”
“Oh, still rock-solid. He didn’t actually commit any of the murders, not physically, that’s the thing. He planned them. Someone else did the dirty work.”
“Who?”
“Adam Jacks.”
Harry looked decidedly puzzled, as if trying to place the name. Then it clicked.
“The young reporter?”
“Yup.
“You’re kidding, surely? Is this conversation really happening, or can I blame the morphine?”
“Oh, it’s real mate” said Crane. “Ricky James has been down the station since Friday evening. We were called to reports of a van parked on the edge of Tardown Head; and turned up to find Ricky and young Adam Jacks fighting on the edge. There was a girl there too; Anna Keating, pretty badly beaten up.”
Harry Wollers still looked puzzled; as if the facts were taking a while to seep into his fuzzy head. Crane went on:
“As soon as we reached the scene, Jacks threw himself backwards off the cliff. They fished his body out of the shallow water yesterday morning. We took Ricky in for questioning and took the girl into hospital under police guard.”
“So what’s it all about?” asked Harry.
“Well, Ricky spent most of yesterday telling us pretty much everything. He seems almost relieved, like he’s been waiting to get it all off his chest. It all revolves around Sarah Dee.”
“The missing girl?”
“Yeah. Ricky and Adam are cousins; and they both had huge crushes on this Sarah girl. Ricky’s was probably born out of guilt; his girlfriend was Maggie Dickens, who – by all accounts – bullied Sarah relentlessly throughout school. Adam’s was more of an old-fashioned obsession: according to Ricky he was convinced that Sarah loved him back, despite there being no evidence that she gave a damn either way. In reality, the pair of them rarely spoke.”
Crane sat on the edge of Harry’s Grand Prix duvet.
“Obsession; love; revenge: that’s what’s usually behind murder. We should’ve known where to look really, but these boys were actually pretty clever. They gave themselves up in the end. No smart police work was involved, I’m afraid.”
“What went wrong then?” asked Harry.
“Well, they hatched their plan when Sarah left town. They struck over that first weekend, before her disappearance was common knowledge. Adam killed Maggie, while Ricky was busy at football practice. Sarah and Ricky became the suspects, but neither could be touched. Nobody suspected Adam. He quietly went about his studies and got a job on the paper, which was actually pretty good camouflage: a perfect excuse for taking an active interest in the case.”
Harry nodded sagely.
“The two of them took their time over the next murder: Ricky even started dating one of their targets; Millie Blunden. For some reason they chose this month to put their plans into action. Callie was ambushed as she walked to work, and Ricky got himself on cinema CCTV at the same time. Mille was abducted and strangled while Ricky was in custody for the previous murder. It really was well planned, you have to give that to them.”
“So what went wrong? How did they end up fighting on a cliff? Did they suddenly decide they were making the next James Bond film?”
Crane smiled.
“It seems this Anna Keating threw a spanner into the machine. She came back for the summer, and got to know Adam. He knew her as a friend of Sarah’s, and we think he was using her for information. But she gave him too much; confessed to somehow betraying Sarah in the past. According to Adam’s warped logic, this meant she had to die too.”
“And Ricky disagreed?”
“So he says. I think he was just tired by it all, whereas Adam seems to have been consumed by some sort of growing madness. Perhaps he was just unable to stop killing. It happens.”
“Wow” said Harry, “Seems I picked the wrong time to go sick.”
“Or the right time,” said Crane.
“Talking of which, where does Dylan Hansen come into it all?”
“Oh, he’s just a hopeless fall-guy. Just chose the wrong time to have a drugs and booze inspired meltdown, poor sod. Apparently he was in serious debt, which inspired his little stunt on the train tracks.”
“Yeah, he said as much at the time” said Harry.
“Ricky admitted to planting the red trainer in Dylan’s locker. He was a member of the football club too, and had access to the locker room. Hansen was just a set-up.”
“So have you let him off?”
“Well, we can still charge him for the fun and games he involved you in: trespassing on a railway, assaulting a police officer, generally behaving like a plank.”
Harry grinned.
“How is he?”
“Conscious, now, or as much as he ever was. He’ll still be in hospital for a while.”
“Well I won’t press charges. I chose to follow him onto those tracks.”
The two men were silent for a while.
“I don’t usually throw praise around, but you’re a brave lad, Harry” Crane said. Not many people would risk their lives for someone like Hansen.”
“Thanks for the compliment boss” said Harry, “but I would have preferred strawberries.”
Crane got up from the edge of the bed and made towards Harry’s bedroom door.
“I’d better get back to the station; we need to officially charge Ricky James tonight.”
“Cheers boss” said Harry.
Just as Nick Crane was about to leave, a final thought occurred to Harry:
“What about Sarah Dee? Any news on her.”
“Nothing at all. She’s the black hole at the heart of all this: anyone who crosses her seems to get sucked clean out of sight. Yet not a trace has been seen of her for two years.”
“Yet she’s inspired three murders; and caused two boys to ruin their own lives?”
“Yup” nodded Crane.
“She must have been some girl” Harry mused.
“Anonymous, silent and passive by all accounts,” said Crane.
“They’re the ones you need to watch,” replied Harry.
Crane nodded and made for the exit.
“Look after yourself, Harry. Don’t overdo it.”
Harry Wollers cast a painful glance around his cramped childhood room, moving his plaster-casted neck slow
ly.
“I’ll try not to.”
Sixty-five
Her feet were now on English soil; eight or so hours after they last touched American soil. The sun had briefly sunk before rising again on a much colder day; such was the unreal nature of air travel. Suddenly her shorts and sweater seemed an inadequate choice of outfit. The morning air was really biting. She dug inside her pink suitcase and rummaged around for her hoodie and gloves.
It was odd, but she’d forgotten quite how cold the English winter could get.
The cavernous surrounding of London Victoria Station made her feel even colder and smaller, and she couldn’t wait to get on her train. She glanced up at the huge departure board and looked for her destination.
She saw it:
10.06: Brighton.
She sat on her suitcase and waited patiently for the platform to be announced.
Sixty-six
(Anna)
(Brighton, November)
It was finally winter; there was no arguing the fact. I was standing huddled against the biting sea breeze in a shabby seafront shelter just along from the ruined carcass of Brighton’s West Pier. I dug my hands into my pockets as deeply they could go and looked up and down the seafront for a glimpse of her.
She was late, but I didn’t mind.
I was happy it was winter; happy that the leaves from summer had all fallen and the earth was hiding under a thick frost, ready to be renewed again come spring. Maybe my memories of the summer could be frosted over as well, hidden from view; ready to be thawed out when March rolled around, bearing flowers and birds rather than nightmares.
I often thought that it was only in winter that we really exist: in the dead months we have to warm ourselves against the cold; keep up our energy through food and rest; burn candles to light the darkness and carve pumpkins to ward off evil. Winter reminds us that we’re alive. In summer we only exist; lulled by light and warmth into some entirely false belief that life should in some way be easy.
It never is.
It was surely only in the summer months that I could have let something as horrific as Adam Jacks’ emergence as CJ blindside me so absolutely.
I shuddered; but not through the cold:
Don’t think about him Anna, don’t think about him.
It was no good telling myself such things. I thought about my relationship with Adam every day. I thought about how foolish; how naive I had been to think my feelings were love; and I thought about how lucky I had been to escape death. I thought about Adam falling backwards off that cliff in slow-motion; and I thought about his last, guttural scream:
“I’m sorry Sarah!”
Although he’d lied to me, assaulted me, tried to kill me; despite all that, my feelings for Adam were still tinged with a slight sympathy. It was ridiculous – I knew – but I’d almost made a partition in my head, on either side of which were two different people; CJ and Adam.
CJ had been the one who stared blankly into my eyes as he tried to kill me. Adam was the one who looked across the night at me as he fell from that cliff; and he had looked like a little boy lost: out of his depth, scared and lonely.
Love was a funny thing, I thought: nobody could quite say what it was, but people lived for it, fought for it, and in Sarah’s case, four people had now died for it.
Or maybe five people had died, if you counted Sarah?
I still couldn’t be sure what had happened to Sarah. I resigned myself to the fact that I probably never would know. Nobody would. She had evaporated like the morning dew on the school playing fields; floated off into the ether. She had deceived and outwitted us all. To guess her whereabouts was to assume one was smarter than her, and I’d finally realised that none of us was.
Somehow, revenge was hers.
After the night it happened I had been taken to hospital, suffering from little more serious than cuts, bruises and shock. By the time I was well enough to return home I made up my mind to leave Tarnsey for good, as soon as I could. My parents were supportive, probably thinking I’d be back in the holidays with bags of washing.
I wouldn’t.
I had moved into a flat in Brighton and taken a job as a waitress in a fish-and-chip restaurant on the seafront. My studies were still several weeks away from beginning, but as I sat on the train pulling out of Tarnsey I felt a huge, ugly burden finally being lifted from my shoulders. As the train entered the bustling outskirts of the city I felt a missing emotion crawling back out from some hidden corner of my brain:
I felt hope again.
That was two months ago. I had now begun my course at medical school and threw myself into my studies with gusto. The more I thought about medicine and essays and lectures, the less I thought about him.
But I still had moments of weakness.
These mainly came at night; when I would wake up still convinced I was on the edge of that cliff: paralysed with fear as he pushed me closer and closer to the abyss. I would always wake up just before I fell; a feeling of hollow doom in my gut.
But it would get better; I was sure it would get better...
*
Eventually I saw her emerging from the other side of the old pier’s husk; a tall figure wrapped up against the cold, pushing a pram slowly into the wind.
Ten minutes later, after Helen and I had settled in the cafe, she took Matthew out of the pram and I held him gingerly in my arms. He was so tiny, fragile and vulnerable: I couldn’t imagine how I would ever cope with looking after a baby of my own, but Helen seemed to be managing just fine.
“He’s beautiful, Helen” I said.
“Thank you” she said, preparing a bottle from the bag she had propped on her lap; which seemed to contain endless supplies of baby wipes, spare clothes, nappies and various other items that were completely alien to me.
Baby Matthew was beautiful. He was tiny, being only weeks old, but already showed signs of taking after Helen rather than Dylan; he had tiny wisps of her dark hair, and the same blue as her eyes.
“He looks like you.”
She smiled.
“Have you heard from Dylan?” I asked.
“Yes. He’s seen Matthew briefly. Claims to want to be a part of his life, see him, provide for him, all that sort of stuff.”
“Are you going to let him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know... he tells me that what’s happened has changed him. He says he’s quitting the drugs and trying to pay off his debts; says he’s going to work hard and make something of himself.”
“But he hit you?”
“I know,” Helen said, looking pained, “but he keeps saying ‘I’ve changed’. I don’t know what to do Anna, should I believe him?”
I thought of Adam again, falling off that cliff; thought about his lost, hopeless expression. He was beyond help. But not everybody was.
“I think you have to give him a chance, let him prove to you he can be a good father.”
“I think so too. Thanks Anna.”
I smiled.
“Anyway, how’re you?” asked Helen, “how’s the studying going?”
“It’s going really well” I said, “hard work, but I’m loving it.”
And I was. Finally I felt I was back on the road to a better future. Despite what had happened with Adam, I still had the chance to become Dr Anna Keating, and I intended to grasp onto it firmly and never let anything loosen my grip.
“What’s your flat like?” asked Helen.
“It’s nice. Pretty basic, but it’s central and I can just about see the sea from my window.”
“And your flatmates?”
“I’m just sharing with a girl from Manchester at the moment; Amira. She’s lovely. But we have a new girl moving in today actually, a student who’s coming over from America. I hope she’s nice too.”
“I’m proud of you Anna” Helen said suddenly, “you’re really getting on with your life.”
“I’m proud of you too” I said to Helen, and I meant it. After what had happened to some
of the kids we had gone to school with, I realised just what a responsibility bringing up a child must be. And I knew Helen could handle it.
*
Later that day, having said goodbye to Helen and Matthew at Brighton Station, I made my way through the town centre and right along Western Road until I reached the turning for the little street in which I lived. It was only just past four, but already the sky was turning from grey to a very dark blue and the streetlights were flickering into action.
I turned the key in the door of number 51 and made my way up the two flights of stairs to the flat, and on entering was hit by the warmth of the heating and the lovely smell of whatever it was Amira was cooking. I was happy to be here; happy to be home.
I shouted a greeting to Amira through the kitchen door, and headed towards my room. It was then I heard the blare of the telly from the living room and vaguely caught a glimpse of a figure on the sofa, watching it. I realised it must be the new girl; I’d almost forgotten that she would have moved in by now.
I diverted into the living room to greet her; she stood up as I entered, extended a hand and smiled shyly at me underneath her fringe of dark hair. She was a small, slight girl, clad in a large pink hoodie with ‘Columbia University’ printed on the front.
“Hi, I’m Anna, very nice to meet you” I said, taking her hand.
“I’m Jin, nice to meet you too!” she replied.
There followed a few seconds of awkward silence. I looked at her hoodie again. Columbia University. I knew that was in New York City.
“Are you from New York?” I asked.
“No, originally from Hong Kong, but I’ve been living over there for three years.”
“Ah, great” I said. “I’ve always wanted to visit New York. You’ll have to tell me all about it...”
Sixty-seven
Sarah Dee Was Here Page 14