‘Hi, we’re here to see Mavis Yates,’ I began.
It wasn’t a good start. The middle-aged woman on reception carried on with her paperwork, not even bothering to look up.
‘Do you have an appointment?’ she asked.
She was one of those. Immediately keen to establish herself as a gatekeeper. We hadn’t even made eye contact yet.
‘No we don’t,’ I began. ‘We—’
‘Then you won’t be able to see Mrs Yates today, I’m afraid.’
She must have been used to exchanges like this.
Alex saw me bracing for conflict and stepped in.
‘I wonder if you’d be so kind as to look at us while you’re speaking ... Julia?’ she said in her posh, authoritative voice. It gave Julia the jolt that she needed.
‘We’ve travelled many miles to try to track down Mrs Yates and we’re keen to speak to her today. She is able to sanction her own guest visits, I take it? In which case, if you’d be so kind as to let her know that we’re here?’
Julia examined Alex’s face. She looked at mine. She clocked the scar on my face, but I sounded too educated to be a thug, so she decided to engage.
‘Who shall I say wants to visit?’ she asked, a little more graciously this time.
‘Please tell her that her daughter’s husband is here to see her. My name is Peter Bailey. She might not have heard of me, but I have been married to her youngest daughter for nine years, almost ten years now.’
‘What is your visit in connection with?’
She was getting snooty again.
‘Just tell her what Mr Bailey said,’ Alex intervened again. ‘She’ll want to see us.’
‘Wait here, please.’
‘Nicely handled,’ I whispered to Alex. ‘It’s easy to see why you’re the TV celebrity superstar and I’m just the local radio hack.’
Julia was gone some time. I could see some of the elderly residents making their way about the place through the glass partition. It all seemed calm and quiet enough. Julia returned.
‘Yes, she’s happy to see you. She’s getting ready now. She’ll chat to you in the visiting lounge. I’ll need you to sign in and to view your ID.’
She looked up at Alex as she recognised the name on her passport.
‘Alex Kennedy! I love watching your show on TV. What a treat having you here. How do you know Mavis?’
Amazing how a bit of celebrity can oil the wheels. That was the last of Julia’s resistance. We were in. Alex had a few scraps of paper to autograph before we were able to move on, but eventually the excitement subsided.
‘You do know that Mavis is in quite a state, don’t you? I need to warn you about that – some people find her appearance shocking. And she gets very easily confused.’
We made our way through the main doors and one of Julia’s colleagues escorted us to the lounge. We were the only people in there. After a wait of a few minutes, we heard voices from along the corridor. A nurse walked in pushing an old lady in a wheelchair.
I saw her hands first and almost gasped when I saw her face. She looked like she’d been melted: one of her eyes was completely obscured by damaged skin, her face was terribly scarred and marked, and her hands were the same. Up until now, this had just been another news story to me, but the consequences of that fire were horrific. Even so many years afterwards, Mavis Yates was a mess.
As a journalist you become accustomed to hiding your reactions. We’re impartial, we don’t make judgments by giving away our emotions, but I struggled with Mavis Yates. I’ve never seen anything so shocking and disturbing.
‘Hello, Mrs Yates. I’m Alex Kennedy and this is Peter Bailey, thanks so much for seeing us.’
Alex was so natural at this stuff. She reached out and shook Mavis’s hand as if there was nothing wrong with it. Her gift, if that’s what you’d call it, is that she spoke to everybody as an individual. The way that Mavis looked simply didn’t matter to her.
Mavis’s voice was scratchy and weak.
‘So you’re Pete Bailey,’ she began. ‘I’ve heard so much about you. Meg would never bring you here to see me, though. I think she was too embarrassed.’
She spoke slowly, but she was easy enough to understand. Her lips had been deformed in the fire and it was tricky for her to form some of the words, but I could see that years of surgery had succeeded in improving things a little.
I took her hand and held it, greeting her and telling her how pleased I was to meet her.
‘Mrs Yates ... Mavis ... this is a difficult visit for me to make today. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me, but I have been married to Meg for many years. She never told me of your existence. I’m so sorry about that.’
‘That sounds like Meg alright. That girl was always one for her secrets. I knew about you, Peter – you like to be called Pete, don’t you? – but I never saw photographs or anything like that. She always told me you were too important to make family visits. I barely saw my own daughter as it was ...’
Mavis’s voice became hoarse, and she struggled to speak.
‘Shall I get you a glass of water?’ the nurse asked. ‘Can I get you two anything, a hot drink maybe?’
The nurse, Anna, left to get our drinks and we waited for Mavis to recover her voice.
‘Do you still see Meg?’ I asked. ‘Has she been to see you recently? Do you have her address?’
Alex tapped her foot against mine. I was doing a Paxman, and she was telling me to cool off. But Mavis answered anyway, as Anna delivered a glass of water and went off again to finish getting our drinks.
‘No, I don’t know where she lives. I last saw her over half a year ago – after she was all over the papers. That’s where I saw you for the first time, Pete. You’re a handsome fellow. I can see why she fell for you. I could see that she was pregnant, but she denied it.’
We paused. It was that journalistic thing again. Wait long enough and they’ll keep talking. She obliged.
‘Meg was always troubled – after that business in the home. I loved those two girls, you know. They brought sunshine into my life. They were all I ever wanted. But that home. It damaged them. Tom would never tell me what it was about, but I’m sure that he knew. He and Meg, they kept their secret from me. Poor Hannah too. After that court case, or inquiry, or whatever it was, Meg was cross, really angry. And those men, that policeman and the social services chap ...’
‘What happened the night of the fire, Mrs Yates?’ Alex asked gently. ‘Your neighbour told us that it was an accident. What actually happened?’
‘This is what happened!’ Mavis shouted, gesturing at her face. It took us both by surprise. Anna entered with our drinks and immediately moved to calm her.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Yates,’ Alex said after a few moments. ‘I know that this is difficult for you, but Meg has gone missing and we need to track her down. We’re trying to piece together what happened.’
‘It’s alright,’ Mavis sighed. ‘But it ruined my life. I’ve been stuck here for years. The pain never goes. I have to use creams constantly, and I’ve had skin graft after skin graft. They think I hear voices and imagine things. They think I make it all up. But everyday I hear the ghosts of the past.’
She paused. Alex and I worked our way through our drinks, waiting for a good time to pick up the conversation.
‘I loved those two girls, you know,’ Mavis said at last. ‘It was only after the fire that I realised how badly they were both damaged. I wanted them so desperately that I honestly didn’t care how they came to us. They were my girls, my beautiful girls. But they couldn’t forget whatever had happened to them in that home. It haunted them. And there was nothing I could do to help.’
‘What happened, Mrs Yates? What did they do? We heard from your neighbour that Thomas might not have been killed by the fire?’
Alex was as gripped as I was by Mavis’s story. We willed her to go on, but could see that Anna was getting concerned about her anxious state.
‘We ro
wed that night, over something silly, and Tom went to sleep in the spare room. The girls shared the other bedroom – they always wanted to sleep together. Meg was the last to bed. She was cross with us, I know that. She went to bed though, I heard her. The next thing I knew, I heard movements in the house. I called for Tom, but he’d gone to sleep. I stepped out of my room and a wall of flame shot up the stairs, catching my clothes and burning my hair. I ran into the front bedroom to call for help. I saw the girls running out into the street. They just watched me. The flames were too high ... there was nothing they could do ... I had to watch my own skin dropping off my face while I waited to be rescued.’
Anna offered Mavis more water. Her face was so scarred that it was hard to gain any sense of emotion or expression, and her mouth was distorted beyond repair. But she spat those words out at us as if the fire had happened only the day before. We waited, but we could see that Anna was anxious to end this now.
‘They got me out of there in the end, but the damage was done. They never thought I was going to survive. Tom died, of course. I wish we’d not rowed that night. I wish Meg hadn’t been the last one downstairs. The investigation said it was the gas heater, an accident they said. I had to watch my own flesh burning, knowing all the time that my husband was trapped inside the spare room. Nobody deserved that. Nobody.’
Although they were very nice about it, we’d had all the time we were getting with Mavis Yates. We were asked to conclude our questioning and to ensure that we made an appointment next time we visited. She was quite distressed when we left her. Anna was kind enough to let us pass on contact information. She promised to make sure that Mavis got it once she’d had some time to rest.
I felt guilty about how we’d questioned her and made her relive those events, but I was grateful for the information. Anna had warned us that Mavis was unlikely to get in touch. The internet had passed her by, she struggled with the phone and she was a reluctant writer. She would still send a card to a friend in Blackpool every now and then, but that was the extent of it.
Both Alex and I were exhausted by the visit. Her story had drained us. It had been an emotional experience meeting Mavis like that. I couldn’t get the image of her face out of my mind. The fire had disfigured her so badly that I couldn’t even begin to imagine what her life must have been like.
So Meg had visited her, we knew that much. And Mavis had been aware of my existence, if only from newspaper reports after the murders. Had Meg ever told the truth, either to me or her mother?
‘Are we staying here overnight or heading straight back on the train?’ I asked Alex. ‘The tickets are open, and we can book into a hotel if you want. You’ll have to pay, mind you. Either that or we’re looking for a hostel for the night.’
‘I want to go back, Pete, don’t you? Blackpool is where we need to be. I’m not sure we’ll get any more from Mavis. Can you face that journey twice in one day?’
We decided to head back that evening. I agreed with Alex. It had been right to visit Mavis Yates, but I didn’t think there was any further information that she could give us.
As we sat down on the train, we accessed the free Wi-Fi and checked out our emails.
‘Now that’s good timing,’ Alex said, after scrolling through and deleting all the adverts. ‘My contact has got back to me. There’s an update on the fire. The official report says that there had been a fight between Thomas and Mavis Yates. Mavis is right about the gas heater. There was a question mark about what had caused ignition though. The girls switching on the downstairs light could have done it, but it was marked as inconclusive at the time.’
‘They’d have known if it was a match or anything like that, wouldn’t they? They can do forensics stuff when there’s a fire, is that right?’
Alex scrolled through the email, opening up the attachments one by one, and giving me a summary of their contents.
‘This is interesting stuff, Pete. Guess who countersigned the adoption paperwork for the girls? It was only Russell Black. Do you think he’s still alive?’
‘How old do you reckon he was then – fifty or so? That was in the early nineties so he’d be in his seventies now. If we’re lucky, he’ll still be going strong. I wonder if he still lives in the area. We should look him up – and that Tony Dibbs guy.’
‘Tony Dodds. The chief constable. His signature can be seen on a couple of these documents too. Do you not think it’s all a bit—’
‘Cosy?’ I interrupted. ‘Yes, I do. We’re hearing the same names come up all the time. Blackpool is only a small place, and these guys would have had their fingers in all the pies. Everywhere we look, they’re there.’
‘What did you make of Hannah when you met her? Was she anything like Meg?’
‘She seemed nice to me. Same as Meg: intelligent, articulate, sane – though I’m not always the best judge of that. But, come on, I’ve known Meg for ages. She’s no psycho, not even at age fifteen or sixteen or however old she was then. Hannah neither. They’re just ordinary people. That fire was an accident. Even the official report said so.’
Alex was distracted. She was reading something on her phone.
‘Oi! Are you listening to me? I’m giving this my best psychological analysis and all you can do is read some nonsense on Facebook,’
‘Shh, one minute!’ she barked back. I hadn’t expected that. It was unusual for Alex. I waited for her to finish. I could see from her face that she was struggling for a way to break something to me.
‘What have you found?’ I said. ‘Is there something else in those papers? It had better be something good – you’ve really pissed me off shushing me like that. What is it?’
‘I don’t know how to tell you this, Pete. I set my news feed up to see all the local papers after we went to the library. I wanted to see if anybody else had covered that lollipop man story. I’m assuming you haven’t seen tonight’s breaking news story? I’m surprised they haven’t called you in to cover it yet. Here, take a look.’
She handed me her phone. I read the headline: Former Blackpool Top Policeman In Murder Probe. I read down, trying to catch the bare bones of the story. It was Tony Dodds. He was seventy-seven. And dead.
They’d found him by that oak tree at the former Woodlands Edge children’s home. They had a suspect under arrest already, a man who’d been spotted at the scene with a couple of others earlier in the day. The suspect was named as Steven Terry, a well-known clairvoyant.
Chapter Seven
1992 It should have been a wonderful time for the girls, but it was not. The prospect of adoption grew closer and home visits were arranged. When Hannah and Meg were away from Woodlands Edge, they at least knew that they were safe for the weekend. But their absence meant somebody else would be taken at night, so there was no consolation in that. Someone else always had to suffer.
The Yates’ home was small but friendly, and when the girls were staying there they could almost forget what was going on. There were trips to the beach, family photographs, all of the things that every child craves. They were spoiled and treated, and the other families living on the street welcomed them with open arms. They looked forward to their weekend and holiday visits.
There were three bedrooms in the small terrace, but Hannah and Meg were allowed to sleep together, as they had done at the children’s home. Mavis and Tom would let them chat late at night, and they’d smile at each other as they listened to the girls giggling in bed, laughing at some story or other.
But there was a cancer in that home from the minute Hannah and Meg arrived. It ate into Meg. She knew that Tom could have done more to help them the night they were taken away in the minibus. And she burned with a desire to see her baby. Is this what Mavis had felt, wanting so desperately to provide a home for the girls? This urgent maternal craving was so strong in her. She spent much of her time wondering who’d taken her child and if they loved him as much as she would have done.
Tom Yates carried the same secret, the knowledge that he’d seen
something that night made him feel a sickness deep in his stomach. But he saw a change in his wife when Meg and Hannah began their overnight stays. It seemed to nourish her. She began to laugh and smile again, her joy had returned. Being a mother renewed her. For Tom, too, it made things complete. A wife, a house, a job and a family – wasn’t this the way it was supposed to be? It felt good to him, and what husband wouldn’t want his wife to obtain her dream?
But Tom’s guilt was his albatross, wearing down his happiness, eroding the reality of their happy family unit. He’d let Gary Maxwell take the girls. He didn’t know what was going on, maybe late-night parties with drink and perhaps drugs, but surely nothing worse? He’d closed his mind to the possibilities, not daring to think about them. He was only a caretaker. Gary Maxwell had the power not only to take his job, but also to take the girls from him. And Russell Black was involved too; he was as high up as they came. If Russell Black decided to interfere, they’d never be able to complete the adoption process.
But Tom knew that he should have stuck up for the girls that night, however hard, however risky it might have been. He knew it. And he knew that Meg knew it. The way she looked at him wounded him. It was as if she wanted to let herself off the leash and embrace her new life, but she remained tethered by this thing between them. She was only fifteen. What could she have done to defend herself?
Tom would console himself by thinking about how adoption would be the best thing for the girls’ future. If he and Mavis could provide a loving, secure environment for them, they’d be free of the children’s home and whatever it was had been going on there. That was the best solution. He had to win the war for the girls, not just the battle. He’d have to carry his wounds if it meant that he could secure their long-term welfare.
The day of the formal adoption was one of the happiest in their married lives. They’d had a good life together, but there was always something missing, and it had depressed his wife. They loved to hear the laughter of children in the house. They’d never have the mayhem of toddlers, the late-night and early-morning feeds, or the visits to the park, but they loved the girls as if they were their own, and for a short time Mavis and Tom Yates felt as if their lives were complete.
Don't Tell Meg Trilogy Box Set Page 57