Melissa did a happy dance in her head. She was calculating the commission as he spoke. The man moved his hand to conceal the stolen key in his back pocket. He gave back the key ring. It was so laden with colour-coded keys that they might go for days without realising what had been done.
They’d got what they’d come for. They had no intention of buying the house. But they would be coming back there again, this time without the complication of an estate agent in tow.
For some ridiculous reason, I hesitated before tearing open the shoebox and working my way through the photographs. I felt as if I was invading Meg’s privacy, yet she was my wife. I’d still not had any formal approaches from her legal representatives, if she even had any; she’d disappeared without a trace, not making any moves to end things between us.
I decided to look. She’d never shared these photos with me. How bad could it be? I knew that she’d lost her mum and dad in her twenties and that she’d had a sister. They’d been killed in a car crash apparently. It’s pretty horrible that – almost an entire family wiped out in a single accident, and no relatives. It’s amazing how a family tree can so suddenly hit a dead end.
I’d never questioned Meg’s family history. Why would I? It had come up early in our relationship, the parent conversation. It turns up as sure as night follows day. Only, when I asked the question, it became an immediate no-go area for us.
At the time we met, both my parents were alive. I had two brothers and a sister. We all got on, but like most modern families we lived miles apart and seldom saw each other. My dad died of a heart attack within three months of retiring, when I was in my mid-thirties. He’d worked all of his life in a job he hated, craving retirement at the age of sixty, and then he’d dropped dead within weeks of reaching his Holy Grail.
Mum was showing signs of going on forever. It had shaken her when Dad died, but she was amazing. She’d taken the punch then got up in the ring and carried on fighting. I was proud of her. People say women of that generation were dominated by men, but it’s the men who keel over with heart attacks and strokes, and the women get on perfectly well without them.
‘How about you? Where do your mum and dad live?’ I’d asked Meg.
Silence. Oh shit, were they dead? We were getting to that age when you couldn’t assume both sets of parents were alive – you had to leave wriggle room in case they weren’t.
‘Mum and Dad are both dead,’ she’d replied. Her answer was curt and tense. She was shutting me down. ‘They died in an accident when I was young. Along with my sister. It was horrible.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, moving in close to offer some comfort. Her body was stiff and unwelcoming, I’d touched a sensitive spot.
And that was it. Meg was happy to talk about my family – she got on really well with my brothers and my sister, but her family became a complete no-no as far as polite chitchat was concerned. I’d warned my family off the topic before they met Meg, and it never came up again.
She’d make the very occasional slip, mention her mum and dad or begin to share a memory of her sister, but other than that, nothing. We never went to family gatherings, there were no Christmas or birthday cards for her from long-lost aunties and uncles. That part of her life was non-existent, it was something that we never talked about.
Being the in-tune kind of guy that I am, it had taken me far too long to understand why Meg had become so keen to have a child of her own. She was making a family, creating roots where there were none. I’d missed that completely, oblivious within the cushion of my extended family. All of my siblings had kids, the Bailey family tree would continue to sprout and flourish. But for Meg, family had meant something completely different.
As I began to sort through the photographs, I became aware of how much I wanted to see those pictures. I had thought that none existed. People do funny things when parents die. Some go off and have affairs, suddenly threatened by the meaninglessness of their lives. Others take trips of a lifetime and blow their savings, finally aware of their mortality. After a while I’d taken it as a private matter for Meg. She had kept no photos, no memorabilia, I had to respect that’s how she wanted to play it. Yet, here they were. They had been hidden from me. They did exist after all.
The first photos were black and white. Future generations will never have that experience of looking at images that were taken decades beforehand, curled and folded from years of handling. There were names on the back, written in handwriting belonging to a generation that would soon no longer exist. It was neat, even, and beautifully penned in brown ink: Thomas Yates, Mavis Irvine.
The early pictures soon morphed into Thomas and Mavis Yates. Faded colour began to creep into the images, then tiny Polaroids. With each new image, the subjects changed their hairstyles and their fashion sense. Then, with no warning, a picture with children.
I was surprised that there were no pregnancy shots. Children’s photographic lives begin from their first scan nowadays, every moment is recorded, from all angles, on every occasion, special or not.
It’s hard to remember the time when you got twelve photos from the cheapest reel of film, thirteen if you got lucky and squeezed an extra image out at the end. It would take a week to get the film developed, that’s if you didn’t mess it up when you took the film out of the camera, and even then you’d have to save up for weeks to be able to afford the costs of development.
No wonder there were no pregnancy photographs. These pictures were taken in the late eighties or early nineties, at a guess, when you could scratch your nose in peace without somebody recording the event on a smart phone.
There were two teenage girls, about the same age, probably fourteen or fifteen. One was quite obviously Meg. She and her companion had appeared from nowhere. I shuffled through the pictures faster now. There they were again, two girls growing up. School photos, class trips, days out, everything that you’d expect to see in a family photo album. But this was only a selection. There were no sets of photographs in this box, only individual images, as if they’d been picked out from a larger collection.
As the girls grew older, it became clear that there was an age difference. It was easy to see that the younger child was Meg. I could recognise her face straight away from the first image, her beautiful spirit shone through. It was lovely to see her like that, in a flowery dress, wearing a terrible shirt with the most flowery collar I’d ever seen. Then came dungarees, crop tops and grunge, this was a life that Meg had never shared with me, one that I didn’t know had existed.
As far as I was concerned, Meg’s life, as I knew it in any detail, began when she was at university. We never really talked about anything before that. I’d get the odd reference to things she’d read or played with as a child, but very few specifics. It wasn’t that I lived in the past, but since I had brothers and sisters, family gatherings inevitably involved anecdotes and memories from when we were kids. Maybe only children didn’t have that.
As suddenly as the two girls appeared in the photographs, the visual history stopped dead. No graduation photos, no leavers’ parties, nothing. It was as if the plug had been pulled. We were well clear of the eighties, that decade was so distinctive, these photos began and ended in the nineties. Meg would have been a teenager then, maybe as old as seventeen or eighteen, perhaps a bit younger. It was difficult to date the pictures exactly. The carefully written notes on the back of each picture had become less common as the years went by and photography became cheaper and a more disposable commodity. Imagine having to caption every image that we take these days? I take so many shots that I leave them with the numbering straight off my smart phone.
This was a mystery. Meg’s maiden name was not Yates, she’d told me it was Stewart. That must have been true – if it wasn’t, we wouldn’t have been able to get married. Who the heck were these people? And why had Meg never bothered to share her stories and memories about them? It looked like a family grouping, it had to be that, but I’d never heard mention or caught sight of an
y of these people.
I dug my hands deep into a larger box, hoping to pull out more documents or photographs which might offer some explanation. Meg must have loved Enid Blyton, there were twenty or so Famous Five books in there, but nothing else to help to throw any light on her past.
Who was this woman that I’d been married to? When we got married, there were no name issues. She’d been Megan Stewart on the marriage certificate, I’d only ever known her as that. My journalistic senses were raging, something wasn’t sitting right here. Why would Meg not tell me about these people? I’d always accepted that her family had died in a car accident; Meg never told me exactly what happened, or when it happened. She got all prickly about it whenever I cautiously mentioned the topic, so I backed off and we never talked about it.
Maybe it was something to do with meeting each other later in life. If you meet somebody young, your family life is pretty well all you’ve got to talk about. When you meet in your late twenties and early thirties, as we did, well, there’s a lot more water under the bridge by that stage. Family life seems less important then, you’ve long since flown the nest and made your own life.
I used the elastic bands from the shoebox to wrap around the photographs. I decided to take them with me. I’d have a dig around, maybe see if Alex had any contacts that she could call upon. I wanted to know who these people were. Meg’s family life had become much more interesting to me and I was beginning to wonder how well I really knew the woman that I’d been married to for seven years.
I finished packing the boxes back into the storage room, and by the time I was done, there was quite a lot of room to move around inside. I turned off the light, pulled down the door, and locked it, giving the padlock a shake to make sure that I’d fastened it securely.
I thought that it might be the last time I’d ever go in there. There was nothing that couldn’t be thrown out. I’d shredded or retained anything private or confidential. When Meg let me know what she wanted to do, when she finally decided to reappear in my life, she could either take all that junk herself or I’d get it taken to landfill. I had no expectation of ever having to go back to that warehouse again. In fact, I was looking forward to the day when I could cancel my standing order and be done with the place.
As I handed the key back to the guy at the office, I had no idea that I’d be back there in a matter of days. And it would be after a meeting with one of the girls in those photographs. The one that wasn’t Meg.
My early shift on the Friday was the last stint I had to work for several days. I’d had a bit of a long run covering other people’s shifts, so I didn’t have to book any leave. It would be fun, a chance to forget about Meg and have a laugh with an old friend. I was due back in the office on the following Wednesday, that would give me and Alex plenty of time for some R&R.
I hadn’t realised how ready I was for it. I’d been in a state of tension ever since my fling with Ellie in the Newcastle hotel. I had only myself to blame, that ill-judged night had come back to bite me. Not only had it messed up everything with Meg, it had also resulted in the deaths of my best friend and his wife and two other completely innocent people. And Tony Miller, of course, Ellie’s stalker.
I’d wrestled a lot with my conscience over the past six months. I knew that Jem’s death was partly my fault, but I hadn’t shared that with anybody. Nobody would ever blame me, there would be no suspicion, but the simple truth is, I could have saved him. I didn’t, because he was supposed to be my best friend and he’d betrayed me. Worse still, he’d used sexual violence against my wife. I was furious with him, but I could have saved him from a terrifying and brutal death instead of rushing out to help Meg.
I was carrying Meg’s secret too. The official report had got the whole thing wrong. She had walked away as a victim, and Sally had taken the blame for everything, but Meg had stepped beyond self-defence. She’d repeatedly stabbed Tony Miller.
It was the way Sally had been judged which bothered me the most. Her kids had spent some time in care, and it seemed that the grandparents would secure a parental responsibility order to look after them permanently. They would grow up learning that their mother had been a killer. Only she hadn’t been, not really, she was no murderer, she’d had a mental illness, depression, and she was pushed to act that way by extreme events. None of us was without blame.
On a bad day, I wondered who I’d been married to. Did I really know Meg that well? And now, having found the photographs in the storage unit, there were even more questions bothering me. Eventually I’d see Meg again. There was nothing I could do until that time. But I was certainly going to dig into her past a little more; it seemed that our whole relationship had been based on lies about her family. I had to know, I couldn’t wait until she finally decided to get back in contact with me.
My last day at work went pretty much as usual, except for one troubling incident. I’d arrived in the office shortly before 5am feeling in a good mood. I made a round of teas and coffees for the early team and started to work through the news stories for the day. It was the usual crap: councillors accused of wasting tax payers’ money; the chief constable being hauled over the coals over stop and search; a local charity under threat because its funding had been pulled. It was time to shake things up, I’d been doing this local drudgery for too long.
I took my breakfast break immediately after the nine o’clock news and passed my boss, Diane, in the corridor, going into her office.
‘Morning, Pete. Everything okay?’
‘Hi Diane, yes, all good thanks, nothing too taxing going on today. Only that strike by the lecturers at the uni. The early reporter has been dispatched to get some audio.’
‘Great, great, a nice quiet Friday then if we’re lucky. Have you got a minute, Pete? I need to run something by you.’
My stomach was rumbling. I was desperate for my egg and bacon butty, but when the boss wants to call you in for an early morning chat, you don’t say no.
Diane unlocked her office door and placed her bags on the table.
‘Take a seat, Pete. Won’t be a minute.’
‘Door closed or door open?’ I asked. The seriousness of the chat would be determined by the answer.
‘Yes, close the door if you would, Pete. I want a quick word with you in private.’
I closed the door. Diane moved her bags under the table, placed her phone on charge and started her PC chugging away with the login process. The office routine.
After a few moments, she pulled in her chair, sat up and looked directly at me.
‘We’ve had another crank letter in, Pete. I’m sorry to have to tell you, but I think it’s important that you know.’
She saw my face drop. I thought the crank stuff had stopped.
‘Is it the same guy again?’ I asked, not really wanting to know the answer.
‘Yes, JD again. Initials only, same scrawl. It has to be him.’
‘Damn it! Sorry, Diane, excuse the language. I thought it had stopped.’
‘I said the same thing myself, Pete. It’s been a month since the last one. I thought he’d got fed up. I’m so sorry, I know how this makes you feel.’
I’m not sure that she did. It made me feel exposed, threatened and unsafe, as if the nightmare would never be over. There had been a flurry of weirdos and nutters once the reports of the events of six months ago came out. It was all over the national press, I’d even seen it on a few foreign websites. Apparently, the nutters love a good murder story. I got a police liaison officer filling me in on the details. I had become a bit of a celebrity, I’d been bang in the middle of a national murder case. Cue the weirdos.
They’d had problems with vandalism at Jem and Sally’s grave. It had become a place of pilgrimage for people who got off on the macabre. They’d visit the graveyard, the cathedral and our house. Some of them even booked viewings, to get ‘the tour’. I tried not to let it get me down. The liaison officer advised me that the letters were unlikely to lead to anything, it would be so
me strange little man getting excited by the contact with me.
There was no address, not even a local postcode. Only initials, no hint of a name and nothing to track him by. This idiot had me by the balls, he could shatter my peace of mind in an instant. Screw him. I’d been all teed up for a nice weekend and now I had this to contend with.
‘What does he say? Are there any threats this time?’
I was terrified of the answer. I was beginning to understand what Ellie had gone through with Tony Miller. At least she could see him and put a name to him, he was known to the police. It didn’t give her any consolation, but she knew who he was and where he lived.
It was not knowing that made this guy so scary. As far as I knew, he could be following me or watching me. He was faceless and nameless. I didn’t know if he was some puny saddo or a madman. The only consolation was that the letters were postmarked Newcastle. He was local to where Tony Miller had been when he killed the poor lad at the OverNight Inn. It didn’t look like he would be bumping into me in the street.
He had the advantage. He knew exactly what I looked like – my mugshot had been all over the papers. They’d used my studio shot from the radio station. I’d asked Diane to stop making my presenter postcards available, they’d had a run on them when the case was all over the papers. She’d agreed to that one immediately and apologised that they hadn’t thought about it before the problem arose.
‘Are you sure you want to know, Pete? I’m going to send it over to the chief constable for a look, see what he can do about it.’
‘I don’t think there’s anything the cops can do, Diane. This guy is trying to rattle me. I have to hope that he’ll lose interest eventually. What does he say this time?’
Diane leant across her desk and retrieved the letter from her briefcase. She’d obviously been holding onto it, deciding whether or not she needed to inform me. She put on her reading glasses.
‘You sure you’re okay with this, Pete? It’s not a nice one.’
Don't Tell Meg Trilogy Box Set Page 28