by Jack Jordan
Dane spoke in a whisper. ‘Two police officers came to the flat and told me. It would have been easier coming from you.’ He was slurring. Naomi could smell whisky on his breath.
‘Your girlfriend was going to leave me out there in the woods, Dane.’
‘She nearly died.’
‘We both could have. But we wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for her.’
He sighed and leaned against the door frame. The smell of whisky was so strong that it made her eyes water.
‘Can I come in?’
‘No.’
George’s front door opened.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘This has nothing to do with you,’ Dane spat.
‘Is he bothering you, Naomi?’
‘Oh fuck off,’ Dane said.
‘I’m okay, George.’
‘I won’t leave until he does.’
‘I’ll make you leave,’ Dane said.
‘Dane, stop. It’s late, and you’ve woken us all up.’
‘I don’t give a damn that it’s late!’ His words echoed down the street.
‘Shut up!’ a neighbour shouted.
‘You need to leave,’ George said.
‘I’m not going anywhere until Naomi talks to me.’
‘She won’t—’
‘Come inside,’ Naomi said.
George fell silent.
‘Damn it, Dane, I said come inside. You’re waking up the whole street.’
Dane stumbled into the house. The soles of his shoes squeaked against the floor. He slumped down on the sofa.
She used to hear him in the house even when he wasn’t there. She would hear the springs in the sofa where he used to sit; she heard him singing in the bath, the tune bouncing off the tiled walls. Once, when she woke in the middle of the night, she heard him on the other side of the bathroom door. She had stumbled sleepily across the room and opened the door, cutting the sound dead. It had all been in her head.
‘I’m okay, George,’ she said into the night.
‘If you need me, I’ll be in my living room. Shout for me and I’ll hear you.’
Naomi shut the door and sighed.
‘Your girlfriend almost got me killed, Dane. What makes you think I want you here?’
‘I’m sorry.’ He was crying. ‘I didn’t know she would … that she could … Hell, I hardly knew her at all. I barely listened to her. We just … existed beside each other. I never let her in. I’ve never stopped loving you. You love me too, I know it.’
Her legs were shaking. She longed to sit, but she couldn’t relax with him there. If she wanted to survive, she had to keep herself together.
‘I don’t need to have children, all right? I just want you.’
She had longed to hear those words for years. Her chest tightened.
‘It’s too late for that.’
He got up from the sofa and came to her. She breathed in the smell of whisky.
It wasn’t enough that he had broken her heart and pushed her to the brink, or that his girlfriend had put her life in danger; he had to keep pulling her in.
Dane was the only man Naomi had ever loved. Ever since waking at the bus stop, she had felt afraid of the world and found it impossible to trust anyone in it. But Dane had taught her to love with all her heart, and she had given in despite every instinct inside her begging her to flee. She had given him everything, and now she had to take some of herself back. Her love for him could get her killed. If she didn’t pull away, she would continue to put herself in harm’s way.
She stepped closer, and as Dane reached to touch her face, her finger prodded at his chest and pushed him away.
‘I told you to leave me alone, to stop coming to my house, but you wouldn’t listen. You never listen. For once, Dane, this isn’t about you. I’m not safe with you in my life.’
She turned for the door. Dane grabbed her shoulders and brought her back.
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means that I can’t keep myself together when you’re around. When I think of you, I forget everything else. I forget to keep my guard up, and right now, I need that guard to survive.’
‘I can help you. I can protect you.’
‘I don’t need you to protect me.’
‘Well, you’re not doing a great job on your own, are you?
Look at you, for Christ’s sake.’
The pills had worn off and the pain in her fingers was rising by the minute, blinking its eyes and stretching its limbs. She wrapped a hand around her fingers and felt them throb in her palm.
‘I need you. I’m sorry, I’m sorry for everything. We can go back to how it was, I promise.’
‘Too much has happened, Dane. I need to be alone.’
‘So you can screw your neighbour?’
Naomi pulled away from his grasp and stepped towards the front door.
‘Leave, and don’t come back. If you do, I’ll call the police.’
Dane followed her to the door and stopped in front of her.
‘What happened to you? Where has the woman I love gone?’
‘You. You happened to me.’
Naomi could smell his cologne, the scent she had to have on her pillow to fall asleep at night. She backed up against the wall.
‘You might hate me, but I could never hate you. I won’t give up on us, Naomi. I can’t. These two years have been the worst years of my life. I need you, and I know you need me too.’
She listened to his voice, the voice she had loved for fifteen years, and wondered how many times he had lied to her. He had dated Hayley Miller before she disappeared. He had been sleeping with Hayley’s sister. Naomi asked herself if she had ever known him at all. Yet even with all her doubts and fears, was there anything he could do that would make her stop loving him? She had to be strong, and she had to know the truth.
‘What happened to Hayley Miller, Dane? You’ve kept the secret from me long enough. I deserve to know.’
For the first time, Dane fell silent.
‘What do you know?’ he said eventually. His voice had changed. She could hear his paranoia, as though it dripped from every word. In all the years she had known and loved him, she had never heard him sound like that.
‘Tell me the truth.’
Dane came towards her. She felt the heat of him against her body.
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘I never said you did. I asked for the truth. Something had to have happened for you to lie to me for all these years.’
‘I never lied to you, Naomi.’
‘You kept secrets. The two are synonymous. They both involve deceit.’
She could almost hear his thoughts ticking over as he gambled with what and what not to tell her. Finally he gave a rattling sigh.
‘Hayley was pregnant.’
Naomi closed her eyes. She thought she had been ready to hear what he had to say, but not that. Anything but that.
‘She didn’t know for certain whose it was, but she thought it was mine. She was terrified what her family would think and made me promise not to tell them until she was ready. I would have looked after them, her and the baby. I would have done it. We were going to talk it through, but she never showed. That was the night she died, and I’ve kept her secret ever since.’
Naomi blinked away tears. Dane had been obsessed with having children, and finally she knew why. He had been denied a child when Hayley disappeared, and he had longed to try again ever since. He didn’t want her child; he wanted the child he had lost.
‘I can’t be blamed for what happened to her, Naomi. I can’t. Please believe me. You know me.’
‘I don’t know you, Dane. You have a whole other life I don’t know about.’
She flinched as she felt the heat of his hand creeping towards her face.
‘Get out.’
‘Naomi, please …’
‘Get out!’
He stumbled towards the door and yanked it open violently. The
door slammed shut behind him.
Naomi locked it and rested her back against it, breathing heavily.
She couldn’t trust him any more. She couldn’t trust anyone connected to Hayley Miller.
THIRTY-TWO
Marcus sat down on the sofa and smiled politely as he looked around the room.
The net curtains at the window were yellow with nicotine. Dead flies lay on their backs on the windowsill. The furniture and decor dated back to the eighties. Judging by the dust coating the mantelpiece, the room hadn’t been cleaned since then either. The surface of the coffee table was tacky from old spills. Marcus prised his mug from the sticky surface and splashed coffee on the table.
‘Leave it,’ Anita Callaghan said. ‘No bother.’
Marcus gave her another polite smile and stifled a yawn. He had been up all night working on the questions he planned to ask her, but as he sat before her in the smoke-hazed room, he wished he hadn’t bothered. He could see by the state of her that she wouldn’t have any new information to share. She had given up hope. It was a dead end.
Anita Callaghan sat on the other side of the coffee table in a bathrobe. Remnants of mascara rested beneath her eyes, and her hair was ruffled from sleep. Wrinkles creased the corners of her eyes and etched her cheeks, with deep smile lines around her mouth. She had been happy once.
She lit a cigarette and took a long drag, giving him a glimpse of stained teeth. When Marcus couldn’t hold his breath any longer, he inhaled the smoke.
‘Thank you for talking to me.’
‘I’ve got to get to the hospital for ten,’ she said. ‘See my girl.’
‘I understand. I won’t take up much of your time.’
‘I ain’t had much luck, have I? One daughter missing, another attacked. Boys in and out of the nick. Two failed marriages. I’m starting to think I’m cursed or something.’
She tapped ash into an overflowing ashtray sprouting cigarette butts stained with red lipstick.
‘I don’t know what she did to deserve that, Officer. She’s usually a good girl.’
Her cavalier tone was startling. Someone had tried to kill her daughter and she acted as though Josie had been caught up in some minor felony.
‘Karma comes to people in different ways, I guess. You mind?’ She took a hip flask from a pocket in her bathrobe and held it up.
Marcus shook his head.
With the cigarette dangling between her lips, she poured dark alcohol from the flask into her black coffee.
‘Karma, Mrs Callaghan?’
‘Anita. Call me Anita.’
‘Karma, Anita?’
‘Well, she was always in and out of trouble as a kid. Not serious or nothin’, but we all get our comeuppance in the end.’
It was difficult to remember that the woman was talking about her own daughter. It was clear that she had adored Hayley. Every frame in the room held a photo of her. Marcus had yet to spot a picture of Josie or her brothers. He had heard of parents resenting their living children after another had died, but he hadn’t witnessed it until now. The room suddenly turned cold.
Anita gulped at her coffee and savoured the taste, but he suspected it wasn’t the caffeine she was enjoying.
‘This is to do with what happened to Josie the other night, ain’t it?’
She took one last drag on the cigarette and screwed it into the ashtray. Her eyes never left him. Smoke curled towards the ceiling.
‘Ain’t it?’
Marcus noticed the hope in her eyes. It was clear that she wanted to discuss her elder daughter. Parents really did have favourites.
‘As a formality,’ he stated, ‘I’m looking over Hayley’s missing persons case.’
‘Oh, thank God,’ she said. She grinned at the ceiling before returning her eyes to him. She covered her smile with a trembling hand.
She looked like a completely different woman. When she spoke of Josie, her face had remained cold and hard, but the mere mention of Hayley had her beaming. A sparkle had returned to her eyes.
‘Mrs Callaghan, I want to clarify that this is just a formality. It may not come to anything.’
The smile dropped from her face.
‘But you’ll try, won’t ya?’
‘Do you mind if I ask you some questions?’ he asked, desperately trying to deflect her intensity.
‘Will you? Will you try?’
He looked her in the eye but longed to break away. She homed in on him, unblinking. The pain in her gaze was hypnotic.
‘I’ll try.’
‘Oh thank you … thank you.’ She chuckled to herself behind closed lips. ‘I knew one of ya would do something in the end. That Elliott bitch wouldn’t even let me talk.’ She put another cigarette in her mouth and froze as she lifted the lighter to the tip. ‘Sorry if she’s your mate,’ she mumbled.
She isn’t.
‘I know it’s been a long time since Hayley went missing, so I understand if things are a little hazy, but I want to ask you some questions. You might remember something now that you didn’t back then. Investigations can be hectic: lots of information to process in a short amount of time. Something that might have seemed insignificant at the time could be really important now.’
‘Ask whatever you want.’ She swigged from the flask, seemingly forgetting her spiked coffee cooling on the table.
‘Is there anyone you suspected in Hayley’s disappearance that we might have overlooked?’
‘I always thought her teacher was a perv, that Mr –’ she clicked her fingers – ‘Jefferies, I think. Yeah, Mr Jefferies.’
‘What makes you think that? Did Hayley say something about him?’
‘Didn’t need to,’ she said. Smoke billowed from her nostrils. ‘I got eyes in my head, ain’t I? I saw the way he looked at her. When I went to the parent-teacher meeting, he smiled at her in a way that made me wonder. But Hayley always got that; she was a beauty. Can’t help that, I guess.’
Marcus remembered the teacher’s name from the file. He’d been questioned, but had an airtight alibi.
‘Anyone else? Anyone you think the police overlooked?’
‘Well they never nicked that cop’s son, did they? Didn’t even question him once his old man got involved. I’ve never felt right about that, even if I did know the kid’s dad from way back.’
‘Were there any particular boys in Hayley’s life that you suspected?’
Anita froze and eyed him coolly from the other side of the coffee table. Smoke curled up from her cigarette.
‘You heard the rumours, I take it, about my girl being easy. Well she weren’t.’
‘I wasn’t insinuating anything, Anita. As a detective, I don’t condemn people because of rumours.’
‘Good, because people in this town talk a load of shite. Hayley was a good girl.’
She ground the cigarette into the ashtray and eyed the packet on the coffee table. Disappointment flashed in her eyes when she saw it was empty. Given the number of cigarettes she had smoked during their brief meeting, Marcus wouldn’t have been surprised if she had only opened the packet that morning.
‘So there weren’t any particular male friends of Hayley’s that you had suspicions about?’
‘I never understood the pigs going after …’ She blushed. ‘Sorry. Don’t mean nothin’ by it.’
‘It’s fine.’
‘I never understood why the coppers went after Dane. He was a sweet lad, treated Hayley right.’
Marcus realised he was wasting his time. She didn’t know anything. He gave a quick glance at his watch.
‘There was a kid that hung around for a while, but he was a skinny, shy little fella.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Hang on.’
She got up and left the room, returning with a scrapbook. She sat back down with a sigh and flicked through the pages, each covered with newspaper articles. Suddenly she stopped, squinting at a black-and-white photo above a news story, then passed the scrapbook across to Mar
cus.
The image was grainy. It was a close-up of Hayley in a class photo, with a fresh-faced boy by her side. The caption gave Hayley’s name, as well as the boy’s: Craig Kennedy.
‘Only person I can think of that weren’t looked into. They were in the same class, I think. You know him?’
Craig. Naomi’s sister Grace was married to a man called Craig Kennedy.
Yes, Marcus thought. I do.
THIRTY-THREE
Naomi woke with a groan as the pain hit her. Her wounds burned as they scabbed over and began to stitch her back together. She got up and hobbled to the bathroom.
It had been weeks since she’d found Amber’s body and she was still without answers. Amber would be starting to rot by now, her veins drying up and snapping like vines. Naomi wondered how long it would take for it to decompose until it was nothing but bones, and if she would have answers by then.
She sat down on the toilet seat and buried her face in her hands.
Her mind drifted to Josie, the woman who had almost got her killed in the woods, lying in a hospital bed, her throat stitched from ear to ear.
Josie, Hayley Miller’s flesh and blood, had been the one who had stood silently outside her door, who had likely thrown the brick through the window, who had followed her down to the beach, who had dragged her into the woods. And yet her stomach wouldn’t stop churning. The person who had been in the alley and on the beach, the same person who had slashed Josie’s throat and chased Naomi through the woods, was still out there.
She flushed the toilet and rubbed her arms until the shivers stopped.
She left the en suite and passed through her bedroom to the top of the stairs, listening to the house and the silence. She had shared so many happy memories there with Dane, with Max, and now it was just her and the bricks and mortar, the past bleeding from the walls.
The windows clicked in their frames as the wind blew against them and curled around the house. The stairs creaked beneath her in lethargic whines. She reached the last step and kicked something hard.