The Girl Who Came Back

by Susan Lewis

  As Barry Britten returned, Kian said, “You need to speak to Anton Quentin, get the addresses of his other properties…”

  “Don’t worry, it’ll be done,” Britten assured them.

  “But when?” Jules cried furiously. “You should already have that information, and that monster of a man should be made to come back here….Jesus Christ, this is a shambles. Just because she’s seventeen doesn’t mean she’s any less vulnerable. She’s just a child, my child, my baby…” As she started to break down Kian pulled her into his arms.

  “We’ve got to try to stop making things worse for ourselves,” he said gently. “I know it’s hard, but there could still be a reasonable explanation.”

  Jules pushed him away. “Then give me one,” she challenged hysterically. “Tell me something, anything, that even begins to make sense.”

  “We’re exploring a number of possibilities,” Britten put in, “and there really isn’t any reason to start looking on the black side yet.”

  “Yet?” she echoed wildly. “So when do we actually start? What is it precisely that triggers the black side, if taking my daughter under false pretenses isn’t enough?”

  From the door Aileen said, “I’m sorry, Jules, but you need to keep your voice down. Your mother can hear and she thinks someone’s here to harm her.”

  Turning away, Jules closed her eyes as she tried to force down the raging swirl of emotions. She longed to go to her mother, not to calm her but to shake her back to her normal self so she could seek comfort and reassurance from her, hear her say everything would be all right, because she was going to make it so. Jules didn’t understand what was happening to the people she loved. Where were they? Who was taking them away? Her mother couldn’t come back, but Daisy could, and would….It was just going to take time and patience. She needed to trust the police, to remind herself that they dealt with cases like this all the time. But how could she believe in them when the detective leading the search had practically accused Kian of being involved in the disappearance?

  There were so many prejudices, mistakes, delays, and all the time Daisy was being held somewhere by Amelia, who was very probably not right in the head.

  It was around lunchtime when the mayor himself arrived to check on the progress. The pub was closed, the bar staff were outside turning people away, though of course they let Dougie through, while the kitchen staff rustled up coffee and food for the family and friends who were still there. It largely went untouched.

  As Kian talked to the mayor Jules wandered back upstairs, avoiding Daisy’s room, where a forensic team was going through everything. She didn’t look out of the windows either, to where a dozen or more officers and several of Daisy’s friends were combing the beach. Heaven only knew what they were looking for, when everyone knew that she’d gone to Amelia’s and hadn’t come back.

  They’d been told to expect further questioning, but it hadn’t happened yet. She might actually welcome retelling what she knew in case she’d somehow missed a vital piece of information, though she dreaded how it was going to be for Kian. Would they try once again to twist things around to make him look, feel, even behave as though he had something to hide? No one who knew him would ever suspect him of trying to harm his daughter, but DS Alan Field didn’t know him, nor did DS Field care how devastating his questions and insinuations might be in his quest to get this inconvenient misper, as he no doubt called a missing person, out of the way before his retirement.

  Kian would be seen as collateral damage.

  Unless Daisy turned up right now, unharmed, unafraid, and bursting to tell the craziest story of what had gone wrong, where they’d been, why it hadn’t been possible to get in touch.

  Joe came through on her FaceTime as the forensic team was leaving.

  For one irrational moment Jules allowed herself to think that he was going to tell her that Daisy had gotten on the flight after all.

  “I’m sorry, there’s still no news,” she had to confess. “The police are taking it more seriously now, or so we’re told, but I’m not sure exactly what that means.”

  “I need to be there,” he said gruffly. His dark, velvety eyes looked sore and scared, his complexion the palest she’d ever seen it.

  “Just wait a while,” she cautioned. “She could turn up at any minute, and if she does, everything will go back to normal and we’ll get her on the next flight.”

  “I guess no one’s heard from Amelia?” he ventured.

  “Not that I’m aware of. Her father was very difficult with me earlier.”

  “Do you think he knows where they are?”

  “I’ve no idea, but I’m sure the police have spoken to him by now, so if he does…” She was losing track of her thoughts.

  “You look beat,” he told her. “How’s Kian holding up?”

  “We’re OK, but we’ll be glad when it’s all resolved and we can put it behind us.”

  “Sure. I’ll second that. I’m going crazy here. I just don’t get what’s happening.”

  “None of us do.” She turned away from the camera. “I think someone’s just arrived downstairs. I should go and see who it is.”

  “Let me know if it’s her, won’t you?”

  “Of course. If it is, I’ll get her to ring you herself.”

  —

  It wasn’t Daisy. It was a detective by the name of Hassan Ansari, who asked to speak to Kian alone.

  When the interview was over Kian came to find Jules in the kitchen. “He took my phone,” he said shakily. “He questioned me about the call I made to Daisy yesterday afternoon when I asked if she wanted a lift home. He wanted to know where I thought she was when she answered. I said I assumed she was at Amelia’s, where I’d dropped her, but I had no way of knowing that for certain. So he asked if I was sure that was all we discussed.” He looked so dazed that Jules could tell he was losing all sense of reality.

  “Did they say why they wanted your phone?” she prompted gently.

  He looked at her blankly, then said, “I should have asked. I didn’t think…Maybe they’ll be able to trace where she was when she took the call. Can they do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  This was tying them up in so many knots, tearing them apart in ways they could find very hard to repair if it didn’t stop soon.

  At the sound of someone climbing the stairs they stopped talking and watched Danny come into the kitchen.

  “Stephie and her parents have just turned up,” he told them. “Apparently Dean hasn’t been home all night either.”

  As a jolt of confusion hit her, Jules turned to Kian.

  “Do they know where he is?” Kian asked.

  “I don’t think they know what to make of it at the moment.”

  “If he’s with her, she’ll be all right,” Jules broke in hopefully. “Dean would never let anything happen to her.”

  Taking his own comfort from that, Kian said, “He’s a good kid. He’s like a brother to her.”

  “I should speak to his parents.” Jules went to the phone. “They’ll be as worried as we are.”

  Not entirely sure what she was going to say to them, Jules waited for someone to pick up at the Foggartys’ home, but no one did. “Maybe they’re on their way here,” she murmured, hanging up and going to the window. There were no police on the beach now; they were either walking around the garden or over inspecting the weir.

  She was about to turn away when a Ford Focus swept in from the main road with two more cars following on behind. Her heart started to burn with a terrible mix of hope and terror. They’d found Daisy. They’d brought her home. It had to be that.

  “She’s here,” she cried, and pushing past Danny, she tore down the stairs, across the bar, and out to the garden. Kian was right behind her, and almost ran into her as she came to a sudden stop.

  Where was Daisy? There were only police officers in plain clothes and uniforms getting out of the cars.

  DS Alan Field came forward. He appeare
d no friendlier today than he had last night; if anything, the grimness of his expression was making her take a step back. She felt panic, denial, an urge to run, to throw herself at his feet, anything to stop him confirming what his eyes were already telling her.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Bright,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid…”

  “Have you found her?” Kian broke in roughly.

  Field looked at him. “I’m sorry to tell you, sir…”

  Jules’s head started to spin. She couldn’t hear what he was saying. His voice was drowning in a gulf of horror. “Where is she?” she cried, stumbling toward him. “What have you done with her?”

  His voice dipped away as he answered, and came back as he said, “…made two arrests…”

  She stared at him wildly. “Tell me she’s still alive!” she growled. “Say it now. Kian, make him say it.”

  No one moved. No one spoke.

  Jules looked around, up at the moor, across the sky. “No!” she screamed. “No! No! No! No! I want my baby! Daisy, where are you?”

  Aileen and Bridget rushed to catch her as she slumped to her knees, and Kian sank down on a bench, his legs unable to hold him.

  Jules looked at Field. Her voice was trapped inside her, but she forced it out, needing to make him hear her. “It’s not her,” she tried to shout. “Kian, you have to tell them, they’ve got it wrong.”

  Still no one moved or spoke; all they could do was look at her with heartbreak in their eyes as a terrible, unbearable silence fell over the bay, so terrible and so unbearable that it was no silence at all.

  Jules was still sitting quietly at the kitchen table at her home in the Risings, vaguely hearing the postman rattling the letter box and the distant sound of a barking dog. The phone had rung several times, but she hadn’t answered. She’d simply allowed her memories to carry her back to the times before that terrible day, to when she’d known how truly wonderful it was to be a mother, a woman who sang and danced, laughed and cried in all the normal ways. She’d been so blessed, had known so much happiness, and had tried to help others in any way she could, until one day nothing had made sense anymore.

  As the clouds darkened outside she could feel the deep, unrelenting claws of loss curling through her like an incurable disease. Her memories were sharp and brutal now, ugly and cruel, yet they were unreliable and skittish too, skimming over events as though afraid to stay too long in one place in case it cracked wide open and pulled her right in to drown.

  It was the day after the police had found Daisy’s body, in a stable at Crofton Park, that Kian had gone with Danny to identify her. They’d advised Jules not to go; the injuries would make the experience too distressing, they said, and because she was still unable to accept it was Daisy she had stayed at home. Such was her denial that she’d even tried to carry on as normal, preparing breakfast and getting ready to take her mother for a scheduled check-up with the psychiatrist, until Em had stepped in and taken over.

  She had no clear recollection now of Em’s arrival; she only knew that her friend had been there throughout those hellish days as the pub garden and beach filled with flowers and candles and toys, and Jules had stared at them as though she had no idea how they had got there or what she was going to do with them. Joe had flown over too, with his father. Seeing Nicholas had meant nothing and yet everything, for she was afraid he might be the reason she was being punished. Em tried to talk her out of that, but Jules was careful never to be alone with him. She didn’t want to break down and end up saying things that would help no one, least of all her. The cruelest irony was the way Kian seemed to take so much comfort in Nicholas’s presence; they’d clearly struck up a good friendship over the years that Kian had spent time in Chicago with Daisy.

  Joe was so devastated it wasn’t easy to know what to say to him. He might be over six feet tall with a true sportsman’s physique and all the bluff confidence of a youngster, but that didn’t mean he had no need of being held and soothed like the child he still was. Jules spent many hours in Daisy’s room with him, listening to him talking about her and trying to come to terms with something that made no sense, and dreading the day he would leave and she would lose him too.

  The funeral undid them all. It was impossible for anyone to hold themselves together as they tried singing “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Jules knew that she would never forget the wretchedness of Kian’s sobs as he sank to his knees, unable to support his grief. It simply wasn’t possible for any of them to think of a world without Daisy in it. There was nothing bright or beautiful about that; there was only darkness and anger and the evil that had stolen her from them.

  As time went on Jules stopped talking about her, even to Kian. She held her grief so tightly in her heart that sometimes it seemed to stop beating. She found it hard to look at those who’d loved Daisy the most; it was as though they were turning into shadows, losing themselves in the emptiness that had taken over their world. Nothing mattered anymore; there was no point to anything when life, in the shape of a plain girl with an insanely malicious heart, could so randomly and cruelly snatch it away.

  Amelia and Dean had been arrested at the scene of the crime and were later charged with joint-enterprise murder.

  Dean had been a part of it. Daisy’s dear friend, who’d been like a brother to her, like a son to Kian and Jules. He hadn’t tried to save her. Instead he’d raped her and taken part in the attack that had ended her life.

  Could that really be true? Surely someone had made a terrible mistake. This wasn’t the Dean they knew and loved.

  It shocked everyone, even the press, when Dean was remanded into custody and Amelia was released on bail. It was virtually unheard of for anyone to get bail on a murder charge, so why was she a special case? What made her so much less of a risk to society when everyone knew that she’d sent the text that had tricked Daisy into going to her house? And the postmortem had shown that every one of the fifteen frenzied stab wounds had been inflicted by the same left hand.

  Amelia was left-handed. Dean was not.

  The answer, of course, was that Amelia’s father was connected in the places that mattered. As a lawyer himself, he could call on, and afford, the best of his colleagues, while the Foggartys had to rely on legal aid.

  “I don’t expect your forgiveness, or your understanding,” Dean’s mother, Gemma, had said when Jules and Kian finally agreed to see her. “I just want you to know what Dean has told me, and what he will say in court.”

  Neither Jules nor Kian spoke; they simply regarded her tormented, swollen face and waited for her to continue. Where was her God now? Jules wondered. What good had he done her?

  “Amelia tricked Dean into going there too,” Gemma began. “When he arrived Daisy was already in the stable, tied up with coarse string and tape over her mouth. She couldn’t move or speak, but he could see how terrified she was, and knew she was begging him to help her. He tried, but Amelia leapt in front of him and started…” She put a trembling hand to her head as she took a breath. “She started cutting Daisy with a knife, and telling Dean if he didn’t back off it would only get worse. Then she threatened to kill Daisy unless he…forced himself on her. She kept saying she knew he wanted to do it, that it was all he ever dreamed about, so here was his chance. He begged her to put the knife down, kept telling her she was wrong, but she wouldn’t listen. In the end she started cutting Daisy again, and Daisy screamed so hard that the tape came off her mouth and she pleaded with him to do as Amelia said, anything to make her stop.”

  Jules’s eyes closed as the depth of Daisy’s fear and panic engulfed her. She could see, even feel the knife sliding into her tender skin, the blood oozing out, thick and red…Then her beloved friend raped her…

  Gemma Foggarty said, “When it was over he thought she would let them go, but she didn’t. So he tried to escape to raise the alarm, but Amelia…” Her eyes went to Jules, showing how reluctant she was to give the detail.

  “Go on,” Jules whispered raggedly.r />
  Visibly steeling herself, Gemma said, “Amelia stabbed her so hard, in the leg, that he didn’t dare to try leaving again. He kept telling himself she’d let them go eventually, or he’d find a way to overpower her.”

  “But he didn’t,” Kian said dully.

  Gemma’s eyes went down. “No,” she murmured, “he didn’t, but no one is sorrier about that than he is.”

  Kian asked, “Has he told the police all this?”

  “Of course, but Amelia’s telling a different story. She says it was all his idea and that she knew nothing about what he was planning when he persuaded her to trick Daisy into going to Crofton Park that day.”

  “The wounds were inflicted by a left hand,” Kian reminded her.

  “She’s saying that Dean did that deliberately, because he knew she was left-handed. Please, you have to know he’d never harm Daisy. She meant the world to him. He’s so devastated and traumatized by what’s happened that he’s not really fighting. He seems to have lost himself….I don’t know what to do to help him.”

  Though Jules felt pity, and was even willing to believe Dean’s story, she had no idea how to help him either.

  Kian said, “Where’s your husband? Why didn’t he come with you?”

  Gemma’s eyes filled with tears. “He can’t face you,” she answered brokenly. “He’s too ashamed, too distraught…He prays all the time, we both do, but I’m afraid our son is going to need more than prayers to get him through this.”

  Knowing she was right, Jules could find nothing to say.

  “Does he think Amelia always meant to kill her?” Kian asked. “That getting him to rape Daisy was only a part of her…intention?”

  Gemma shrugged helplessly. “I don’t think he has any idea what was going through the girl’s mind. He said that it all got out of hand when it became clear she wasn’t going to let them go. Daisy began screaming at Amelia that she was a crazy bitch, a liar, a freak….He could see the effect it was having on Amelia, so he tried to make Daisy stop, but she wouldn’t, or couldn’t. She was hysterical, beyond his reach. Then suddenly Amelia began stabbing her. Dean tried grabbing her hands, but her strength…He says it was impossible to get hold of her. He did in the end, but by then it was…it was too late.”