The Rift

by Nina Allan

  Which Julie was the real one? Theirs, or hers?

  Perhaps the need to know everything for certain was a selfish need. Selena thought of the people you saw on TV chat shows, distraught husbands and wives who’d gone searching through their partner’s pockets and emails and credit card statements and wished they hadn’t.

  If you don’t want to know the answer, then don’t ask the question.

  So Julie guarded her privacy. Was that so strange? They barely knew each other.

  “Would you like to come round?” Julie said. “To the flat, I mean. We could go for a walk, or something.”

  “I’d like that,” Selena said.

  “What about Saturday?”

  “Saturday’s fine.”

  Outside on the street, they hugged. Selena caught the scent of Julie’s hair: slightly bitter, damp from the rain, familiar since forever. Julie felt tense in her arms, almost rigid, and for the first time Selena found herself wondering – truly wondering – what her sister had been through.

  5

  In the November of 1996, Greater Manchester Police arrested a self-employed plumber and electrician named Steven Jimson, initially for a stolen passport, although as the investigating officers soon discovered that was just the beginning. Jimson, who was nicknamed the Barbershop Butcher on account of the logo – BARBERSHOP PLUMBING – on the side of his van, was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment on three counts of murder and five counts of violent sexual assault. Jimson had been running a tin-pot illegal courier operation alongside his plumbing business, ferrying knocked-off stereos and packages of cannabis and – occasionally – exotic reptiles all over Europe. He had also been using his van as a mobile murder venue. Jimson was from Stockport originally, but he had friends in Warrington and was often in the area, which was what led police to develop the theory that Julie might have hitched a ride with him.

  For the first two months of 1997, media interest in Julie’s case spiked again as speculation mounted and newspapers vied with each other for an advance lead on the story they now saw as inevitable: that missing teenager Julie Rouane had been the Barbershop Butcher’s fourth victim.

  The story never broke, though. Steven Jimson insisted he’d never spoken to Julie, never so much as laid eyes on her, and there was no evidence to prove otherwise. Julie was still missing and no one was any the wiser as to what had happened to her.

  The police made just two arrests in Julie’s case: Allison Gifford, and the man named Brendan Conway who was supposed to have been acting suspiciously in the vicinity of Hatchmere Lake on the evening Julie disappeared. The papers christened Conway ‘the dog-walker’. Selena remembered the newspaper photographs, the endless TV coverage followed by the media freefall that followed once it was established beyond all reasonable doubt that Brendan Conway was innocent.

  At the time, the images of the man in the brown anorak had given her nightmares, though as she grew older she had come to feel disgusted by the media’s treatment of Conway, who had learning difficulties, and whose only crime was to be seen walking his dogs in the woods at his usual hour.

  The final, definitive sighting of Julie had not been anywhere near the lake, in any case, but in their local Spar shop. Beena Gupta, who worked there, confirmed to police that Julie had come into the store at around three o’clock.

  “She bought a Twix bar and a can of 7-Up,” she said. “Or Tango. It might have been Tango. Yes, she was by herself. She didn’t say anything, she just handed me the money and then left. No, she didn’t seem worried, she seemed OK, just normal really. I don’t know if I ever saw her before. We get a lot of kids in here. Some of them steal things, occasionally, but she wasn’t the type.”

  From a selection of photographs of teenage girls, Beena Gupta identified Julie immediately and without hesitation.

  They had given the police Julie’s most recent school photograph, Selena remembered, because it showed Julie’s face in close-up, although it didn’t resemble her, not really, what school photo ever does? Selena only had to think of her own from the same year, her face horribly shiny and covered in spots – that was how she remembered it, anyway. She’d loathed it so much she kept trying to think of ways she could avoid taking it home, like telling Mum the school lost the negative, or that someone had nicked it – that Scott Maidy git, he’d pinch anything.

  She’d gazed at Mia’s photo with a kind of rapt envy: the smoothly parted hair with its silver hair slide, the flawless skin.

  Julie looked like a war child in hers, angry and staring, not as bad as Selena’s spots but not great either. Julie never said anything, but she hated that photo, Selena could tell.

  It’s not a good likeness, Margery had said to the detective sergeant at one point. She tried to give her another photograph, one of Dad’s candid shots, Julie sitting at the kitchen table and looking off to one side. Her mouth was slightly open, and there was a small crease between her eyebrows. Selena couldn’t remember when the photo had been taken, exactly. It looked like Julie, though.

  This is a lovely photograph but it’s not so clear, the policewoman had said. She took it away with her anyway, although so far as Selena could recall it had never been used: not in the papers, not in the news broadcasts, nowhere. It was always Julie’s school photo they showed, the surly-looking adolescent with her hair hauled back off her face like she was in borstal. Selena felt a thrill of horror each time she saw it, thinking what if it had been her instead of Julie?

  It would have been her picture plastered everywhere, the awful one, the one she’d thought of chucking in a puddle on her way home from school. She’d have gone down in history as a bratty teenager with greasy hair and bad acne.

  * * *

  Hatchmere Lake was what the papers referred to as a local beauty spot, part of the deciduous woodland and protected greenbelt that had once been the private hunting grounds of the Earls of Chester. Dad sometimes used to take them there at weekends when they were kids. They’d built camps in the undergrowth, taken turns with Dad’s binoculars, ostensibly to identify birds but actually to spy on people down by the water. They’d once run into two men – fishermen, they’d claimed, although there was no sign of any rods or buckets or other fishing paraphernalia anywhere nearby – who had told them a story about a catfish so enormous it broke a man’s leg.

  “It’s true, honest,” said the younger one. He had a shaved head, and marks in the crook of his elbow that looked like needle scars. Then the older one had asked Selena if she wanted to see his dick, so they’d run away.

  It was scary, only not really, because they’d known Dad was within yelling distance, easily.

  “Did you see it?” Selena had squealed.

  “Don’t,” Julie said. She hugged herself and shuddered, making a brrr sound. “They’re aliens.”

  On the car ride home, Selena asked Dad if it was true that there were catfish that could break a man’s leg and he said yes.

  “Wels catfish, they’re called. They can grow up to six feet long in some places. You won’t find them that big in England, though. The water’s too cold.” He told them that most of the really big catfish lived in the Mekong Delta, in Vietnam.

  Neither of them mentioned the man and his alien dick. At the time Julie went missing, they hadn’t been near the lake for at least a year, more like two. Selena knew of several incidents that were supposed to have happened out there, the kind of rumours that get passed around at school, becoming more dramatic and more unpleasant with each retelling. Most of them weren’t even true, probably, but Hatchmere still wasn’t the kind of place you’d choose to go alone.

  But what if Julie hadn’t been alone? That was what the police seemed to be hinting at, anyway. They asked Selena dozens of questions, over and over: had Julie been unhappy at school, unhappy at home? Did Julie have best friends, boyfriends, enemies? Had Julie ever stayed away overnight without telling anyone where she was? They seemed particularly keen on knowing what kind of mood Julie had been in when she left th
e house.

  “In your own words,” said the detective sergeant – DS Nesbitt, who reminded Selena of Etta Tavernier from EastEnders. “Anything you can remember, anything at all. Don’t worry if it sounds like a small thing. Small things can be important. Would you say that Julie was sad that day, or was she happy?”

  “She was just normal,” Selena said. She told DS Nesbitt about being in the living room watching TV when Julie left the house, about hearing Julie call out to Margery that she was going to meet up with Catey Rowntree. Selena liked DS Nesbitt, who sat so still and spoke so calmly, and if Margery hadn’t been there in the room with them she would probably also have told her how strange she thought it was that Julie had made such a big deal about telling their mother where she was going.

  As things were, she felt awkward about mentioning it. What do you mean, Julie never tells us anything? she imagined Margery saying, once DS Nesbitt and DC Simpson had left the house. You know that’s not true, Selena, so why say it?

  Selena couldn’t see that it mattered much. Everybody already knew that Julie didn’t meet up with Catey, that she never intended to. The information was hardly ground-breaking. Best to keep quiet.

  * * *

  The most crucial time in a missing persons case is the first forty-eight hours. That’s what the police said, anyway. In Julie’s case, the first forty-eight hours brought dozens of reported sightings – hundreds. What made the police focus on the Hatchmere sightings particularly was that three entirely unconnected witnesses – a mother of two young children, a passing motorist, an elderly couple – all phoned in descriptions of Julie that put her in the same place at roughly the same time, wearing clothes that were similar to those she’d actually been wearing when she left the house. Two of the witnesses – the motorist and the elderly couple – even mentioned the red backpack she’d been carrying, a detail that had deliberately been omitted from the police description.

  The call for witnesses who had been in the vicinity of Hatchmere village on the afternoon and evening of Julie’s disappearance also yielded more than a dozen sightings of the same man: a tall, unkempt-looking individual wearing a brown or grey cagoule, or anorak – this in spite of the high afternoon temperatures, which the Met Office estimated at around twenty-eight degrees – and accompanied by two large dogs. Several of the witnesses correctly identified the dogs as Irish wolfhounds. Most also mentioned the man’s manner, which they variously described as odd, suspicious, erratic, evasive and nuts. Loitering with intent, said one. I deliberately speeded up to get away from him, said another.

  He scared me, said a third, a young woman named Marie Evans who at twenty-one years old was just three years and eight months older than Julie herself.

  * * *

  There was a massive police search for Brendan Conway – the more scurrilous of the tabloids insisted on referring to it as a manhunt. As it turned out, Conway lived with his aunt in one of the tidy new bungalows close to the centre of Hatchmere village. Conway walked his wolfhounds in the woods every day, he said, sometimes twice a day, if it wasn’t too hot. The dogs liked being near water, and there was plenty of open space for them to run.

  Brendan Conway wasn’t much in the habit of watching the news. He knew nothing about a missing girl. Nor had he seen the police photofit images of himself: a ghoulish stranger in a hooded raincoat and with a blank expression. He probably wouldn’t have recognised them if he had.

  When the police took Brendan Conway into custody, his main concern was for his Irish wolfhounds, Billy and Bessie. His aunt couldn’t walk them, he said. She’d had a heart attack the year before and didn’t get out much.

  He was worried the dogs wouldn’t understand where he’d gone.

  Conway’s evident distress over being parted from his canine companions earned him brownie points later with the same journalists who’d been busy casting him as a possible murderer only days before. The dogs ate better than Conway and were in fine condition. In the end, even the nastier and more salacious of the local rags were forced to admit that Conway was innocent, a victim of police harassment, a local hero.

  * * *

  Brendan Conway was allergic to sunlight. He wore the mackintosh to protect his skin, which blistered badly if he didn’t cover it. His face was scarred with pockmarks, from childhood acne and from what Conway quaintly referred to as slips of the light.

  “I go out once it’s dark, mostly,” he said. “But it’s not fair on the dogs, is it, not all the time? They enjoy the sunshine.”

  * * *

  Mum cleared out Julie’s room over the course of a weekend, a fortnight before contracts were exchanged on the Sandy Lane house. Selena offered to help but Mum said no, she’d do it herself, she wanted to.

  “If there’s anything you want to keep now’s the time to say so,” she added. Dad had already moved out by then, first to Mirlees House, then to the flat Mum had helped to find for him on Didsbury Road, ten minutes from where Selena was currently renting a bedsit in a large Victorian house not far from Didsbury Park. Selena believed that at least one of the reasons Mum finally decided to move was that Dad still had a key to the Lymm house, and Margery didn’t quite have the heart to ask for it back.

  Dad was always coming over on the bus while Mum was at work. Often she’d come home and find him sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper, as if the divorce had never happened. He also liked to go and sit in Julie’s room. He would look at her books or else sort through her things – the stuff on her desk or in her bedside cabinet, even the clothes in her wardrobe. There was something in the way he did this that made Selena uncomfortable, and she knew it drove her mother up the wall.

  “He wouldn’t be doing this if she were still here, would he? He wouldn’t even be in her room without her permission.”

  Selena had grown so accustomed to her mother not talking about Julie that on those rare occasions when she did it seemed almost indecent. In contrast with Raymond Rouane’s all-consuming obsession, Margery’s mourning had been a savage and solitary affair, seldom witnessed and never spoken of.

  Margery had found her husband’s compulsion to talk, to relive, to hash over impossible to deal with, Selena now realised – more impossible than his breakdown even, his brief but searing encounter with full-blown madness. Madness was a disease, after all, something you could treat with drugs and monitor in hospitals. Grief could never be healed, so best not to mention it. Ray Rouane would handle the objects in Julie’s room – a silver photo frame containing a picture of Julie and Selena together at Whitby Abbey, a porcelain horse with gilt shoes that had been a present from his sister Miriam – with the kind of reverence that might be afforded to archaeological relics, souvenirs of a vanished civilization. This was what they were, in a way – relics from the Kingdom of Julie, now submerged so far in the past it was dangerous to visit.

  Julie herself had lost interest in these trinkets years before she went missing. They were there in her room by default – bits of junk she’d have cleared away by herself if she’d been bothered. In the first weeks following her sister’s disappearance, Selena used to sneak away to Julie’s room quite often – not to go through her things like Dad did but simply to be there, to sprawl on the bed, to work her way in under the duvet and imagine how furious Julie would be if she came home suddenly and found Selena in her room, the inner sanctum, humming along to Julie’s Björk CD like she owned the place.

  She imagined Julie’s rage as a bonfire, and herself dancing in the embers and laughing with the sheer uncomplicated joy of having her back.

  For Mum, it seemed as though clearing Julie’s room was her way of finally saying goodbye. For most of the past five years, everything had been about Dad: Dad losing his job, Dad having his breakdown, Dad driving around the countryside like a lunatic. The room-clearing was between Mum and Julie. Selena picked out the photograph of Whitby Abbey, the china horse, a wooden pencil box with a sliding lid that had been on Julie’s desk since the dawn of time. She also
took a piece of Julie’s clothing, a maroon sweatshirt with a large appliquéd owl on the front that she had always lusted after. By some miracle, it still fit. Even if she never wore it, Selena didn’t like to think of the sweatshirt ending up in the wardrobe of a stranger.

  Once Selena had finished choosing, Margery boxed up Julie’s books and the rest of her clothes and took them to Oxfam. Everything else she put into bin bags and drove to the dump.

  “Aren’t you going to tell Dad?” Selena asked.

  “I can’t, Selena. Be reasonable. You know what he’s like.”

  Selena did know, and although she felt some misgivings about tricking Dad, because what else could you call it, she had to concede that Mum was right. If Ray had known what they were doing he would have insisted on having every last article packed up and transported to his flat, which was becoming a hoarder’s paradise as it was.

  Mum saved some stuff back for him, though: the leather suitcase from under Julie’s bed and everything that was in it, the two photo albums and her diaries, a stack of her school exercise books and project folders – all the things Dad would have picked out first, if he’d had to choose.

  By the time Ray next came round the job was done. Selena never found out how he reacted when he found out, because she wasn’t there.

  6

  “Tell me what happened with Dad,” Julie said. “Please, Selena. I want to know.”

  “He was in hospital for a while,” Selena said. “You know, the Walsey? It’s closed down now.”

  Julie nodded.

  “He seemed OK at first,” Selena went on. “He was the one bucking everyone up. Demanding answers, making lists, giving interviews, even though the police said it would be better not to. He reckoned the more information people had, the more likely it was that someone would remember something. Or let something slip, whatever. We had no idea he’d been let go from Croyde’s, not for ages, not until Larry Kraefsky came round to see Mum, asked her how Dad was taking it. Dad had been bunking off work for days at a time, apparently. Not telling anyone, just jumping in the car and driving around. There was one time he drove all the way to Guildford and back, just because of some news report. Larry gave him three official warnings but in the end he had to fire him. He couldn’t afford to keep him on, I suppose, not like he was.”