Get your limbs moving, someone told me that. They lift my leg, ask me to resist. Sometimes my leg moves. Sometimes it doesn’t. I want my limbs to move. I want to do it on my own. I don’t like being touched. I don’t mind Rosie doing it. She’s gentle. She loves me. She told me that. She’s Miss Delicious.
My voice is broken, it croaks—that tube broke it. Rosie understands me when I speak. They’ve moved me to a different place, I think. I’m not sure. The room looks different.
There’s a woman to help me talk, to form words. We repeat words over and over again. I want to talk properly. I want to be understood. The words in my head don’t come out of my mouth. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. They aren’t always in the right sequence. I know what I want to say, mostly.
I can focus my eyes now, look around. They tell me I broke my legs. That I was in a car accident. I have a brain injury. It’s on a poster on the wall. So I can remind myself. I can read words. Rosie said that they found who did it. A young girl, drunk, or was it a boy, I can’t remember. She didn’t do it on purpose.
Am I young, too? I still don’t know.
They shaved one side of my head and made a hole in it. They’ve not let me look at myself yet. There are no mirrors in this room. I touch the soft place with my fingers. I don’t like what I feel. Mushy. I don’t know what I look like. I want to know what colour my hair is. I think it’s red. The nurse said grey. Why would someone dye my hair grey? I certainly didn’t do it. Perhaps Lily did.
I can move my legs a bit, they’ve taken off the clamps, the bindings. The doctor says my legs are healing nicely. They took me down for a scan. I didn’t like it. Something isn’t right, I don’t know what it is.
I don’t want games today. I don’t want to move my little toes. Piss off, Piss off. Rosie says I’m naughty. I slap her hand. I pull her hair. She cries. Tells me to stop.
I’m tired. He came in the night again. Put his fingers around my neck. He laughed. His fist smashed into my nose. I scratched his face. He slides in through the window when it’s dark. It’s their fault. I keep telling them to lock it.
They forget.
66
He’s in the room.
Heart thundering against her ribs, drenched in sweat, Thomasine jolts awake. A smell gags in her throat—turpentine. Hand over her own mouth, she smothers the cry for help before it leaves her lips. Blinded by darkness, her ears seek him out. Nothing but silence. Then she tunes into a low hum, a heater perhaps.
Where am I? At the edge of her sight there is a flicker of light. A curtain, window?
A draft of ice cold air touches her bare shoulder. The luminous digital display on her watch shows just gone four o’clock. Too early for daylight. Her eyes adjust to the dark, a flat-screen TV hangs on the wall in front of her. Silently, she slides off the bed, her hand reaching for her car keys on the bedside table. She slips a key between her fingers, her body tense and ready to strike.
Come on you bastard, where are you?
A toilet flushes; she flinches. It comes to her. Exhausted, she’d booked into a Holiday Inn Express, outside of Nottingham. The only room available recently renovated, the receptionist informed her, the smell of paint still lingered, would that be a problem? It hadn’t, not until now.
Thomasine sinks back onto the bed. A three-quarters drunk bottle of red stands on the vanity unit opposite her. Self-medication to dull the gut-wrenching numbness that’s had her in its grip from that moment in the lockup.
It’s scored into her memory, the large canvas. She lifted the cover, peered beneath it in the half-light. At first, thought it was some form of fantastical landscape, and was about to let the cover drop when she changed her mind. The word tardiness came to her, not the painting, but her work if she lost that methodicalness that was central to it.
The painting was of a woodland, a slice of the world above and below. The top third of the large canvas a Prussian blue sky littered with stars. Beneath that a corpse of trees, layers of dark brown leaves litter the ground, dead man’s fingers – mushrooms – protrude up through the soil. A large rat twists its tail around the base of the tree, its nose rooting in the earth.
Her eyes continued to flick over it. Below was the underworld. There’s a sprite, or a woodland goddess, a girl at any rate, naked, lying prone, her legs slightly apart. One leg raised above the other. Her face turned outwards. The girl’s skin had been painted an ivory grey, her long brown lashes fringed milky white eyes. Chestnut coloured hair hung about her shoulders, stained a deep velvet red at the tips. A trail of woodlice wove its way up her neck towards her ear. The long yeasty coloured roots of an oak tree held her in an embrace. There was something sick about it.
Her eyes settled on the girl’s face for a moment, took it in. Immediately, she felt the icy gaze of the girl tear right into her.
Pale brown freckles littered the nose and cheeks, even white teeth lay beneath blue lips, the girl’s lower lashes rested on her cheekbones.
Karen—her sister, Karen.
Her legs gave way without warning—the side of her head hit the concrete floor with a crack. Stomach acid burnt her throat as her breakfast shot up her throat and splattered onto the floor. She’d lain there, in her own sick, unable to move. A white-hot pain wrapped around her forehead, the stench of vomit soaking into her clothes.
It took her a while to pull herself together. To clean up after herself, to push her anger somewhere to the back of her mind where it wouldn’t overwhelm her. She changed her gloves, tucked the contaminated pair in her handbag. The best she could, made sure that all traces of her were obliterated.
It was only then she removed the covers off the remaining canvases.
He’d objectified them all, backs arched, legs open, lips parted in slow smiles that made them appear complicit.
Karen, Andrea Wharton’s sister – Candy. Belinda Arnold’s sister – Charlotte.
He must have killed all three.
Are the girls buried up on Anglezarke, are they in the woodland, too?
Every bone in her body had wanted to rip the canvases from the walls, burn them.
It took all her effort to collect herself; she splashed cold water on her face. Got on with searching the rest of the lockup. Against the wall stood a wooden cabinet of sorts with long narrow drawers – the sort used to store maps in. She slid open the top drawer, picked through its contents – pencil drawings, nature, landscapes, mushrooms, trees – then moved on to the next. Charcoal sketches – tens of them. Teenage girls in swimming costumes, lying by a pool, on sunbeds, limbs splayed, spines flexed. Their wet hair dangling on their shoulders. Her stomach clenches—he must have been watching the girls for weeks.
A stack of photographs had been carelessly stuffed into the next drawer down. Mostly torn and tattered at the edges, the colours faded and washed out. Skinny girls in hot pants, long coats, maxi dresses – the seventies and early eighties. None looking directly at the photographer. Bennett was obsessed with teenage girls, she’s convinced of it. She had chided herself, what use was a gut feeling. She needed proof—actual evidence. He could probably talk his way out of the paintings. Put herself and the other families through sheer misery.
She had pushed on, given the task all her full attention. The rest were landscapes, the moorlands, Anglezarke, the mast at Winter Hill, Rivington Pike, lower Rivington reservoir. A brown envelope is tucked against the rear of the drawer. Again, more photographs, faded colour prints that must have been taken years ago. Her breath faltered… there was a familiarity about them.
She lays them out, then picks them up one by one.
In the distance a drystone wall circles the house, the roof of the barn shimmers in the sunlight. Then in another a tractor stands idle in the field, a man kneels beside it, nearby two dogs out of focus as though taking flight. There are two of a dark-haired woman, arms lifted, pegging a pair of dark grey overalls on the line. The long sleeves of a white shirt are caught by the breeze. In the foreground a you
ng girl, long grass swirling around her legs, clothed in blue cotton shorts and a white gipsy top embroidered at the edge. Her dark curly hair caught up in pigtails. A frown on her face, she looks directly ahead. Hand raised in a wave.
It can’t be—it can’t be.
It was.
67
His gloved fingers wrap around the heavy iron padlock that secures the gate. It’s locked. His lips twist. This is bloody laughable. Does she really think it will keep anyone out?
The farmhouse is deserted, no car, no tracks, the cobbles buried beneath virgin snow. He wonders if she’s living there, in a matter of hours the snow changed the landscape. It could have wiped away all trace of her.
The place is a mess, a decaying cacophony of rubble. He is wary of tackling the barn, he’ll need a ladder. He’ll do the house first, from around the back. There’s a gap in the wall circumventing the farm about ten metres away, an easier entrance. The ground beneath his feet is a health hazard, hidden by the snow, tumbled down lumps of stone lie abandoned. As he climbs through the gap, he spots that the curtains are drawn. She might have closed the house up. An unease settles in his stomach. I’m not stupid, the police will have been all over the place, any new finger prints will flash up.
He shrugs off his backpack, props it on the doorstep. Tugs his gloves off with his teeth, the wool stinks of wet dog and urine, he drops them by his feet. He retrieves a pair of blue gloves from his bag; the latex digits tear as he struggles to get them on. His hands are freezing cold and wet, he can’t feel his fingers. In a fit of frustration, he wrenches his hands back into the sodden woollen gloves. Stuffs the latex ones into his pocket.
He endeavours to calm himself, other than what he finds inside the house, every element of his plan has been worked out fastidiously. Even the clothes he’s wearing will be despatched into the clothing bank at Sainsbury’s. Miles away from this place.
The silence is deafening. He takes the hammer and chisel from beneath the folds of his sleeping bag. Lodges the chisel between the door and the frame. One swipe with the hammer and the lock breaks. He throws his shoulder against the door; it gives way beneath his weight.
His stomach somersaults; his memory of that night awakes.
It’s thirty-seven years since he’s been in this room.
It looks exactly the same.
68
Sam is here, I like Sam. He likes me. I can tell. It’s the way he smiles at me. I’m his Bonny Lass. He strokes the back of my hand. He’s got a sing-song voice. He’s going to catch who hurt me. He keeps telling me that.
I reach out my hand, the words won’t come out. I want to say thank you.
‘Hello, Veronica, how are you today?’
‘Go-o-d.’
‘Me too.’
I laugh. Rosie likes it when I laugh. I do it again.
He looks at Rosie. She looks at me. Is something wrong?
‘Are you sure this is okay?’ His eyes crinkle at the edges.
I wonder how old he is. Am I as old as Sam?
Rosie nods her head. ‘Sam wants you to look at some pictures, is that okay, Veronica?’ She leans towards me. Her breath smells of apples.
I nod my head. It only hurts a little bit. I like pictures.
‘They’re old pictures, Veronica. From when you were young.’
Am I not young anymore?
‘Is that alright?’
I nod my head. This time it hurts, I let out a little cry. Rosie strokes my face.
Sam takes a picture out of a brown envelope. ‘All I want you to do is squeeze my hand, Veronica. I’m going to tell you who someone is and I’m going to ask you if you know them. Is that okay? Like I said, just squeeze my hand. One for no, two for yes.’ He puts his hand in mine. ‘Is that ok.’
I squeeze his hand twice. I like this game already.
Rosie takes hold of my other hand. ‘Are you sure, Veronica?’ I squeeze her hand two times, then two times more.
‘Is this Jimmy?’
Jimmy. I remember Jimmy. Jimmy slides through the window. He crushes the bones in my neck. He kills me in the night. Every night.
The bed shakes. I am shaking. I want to say no. No isn’t right. It is him. I hate him.
Rosie slips her hand into mine. ‘Don’t be afraid, Sam won’t let him hurt you.’ Her eyes are shining and wet. ‘Just squeeze my hand if it’s him.’
I scream at my hand, move hand, move hand!
‘Aye bonny lass, you’re doing alright. It’s him, is it?’
I squeeze his hand twice.
‘Good girl,’ he’s not smiling.
I can see something in my head. It’s him. He’s thin. He’s kicking out his leg. Dancing. He kicked me. Kicked me in the back. Move hand twice. Squeeze. Squeeze.
I look at Sam, open my eyes wide.
‘Did Jimmy hurt you?’
My fingers claw at Sam’s hand. Two squeezes. Two squeezes. My throat tightens, the air won’t come in. I can’t swallow. My heart is bumping against my chest.
‘Is that a yes, Veronica? Squeeze my hand again if it is.’
Yes. I squeeze his hand. Did I do it twice, I can’t remember? I gasp for breath.
‘That’s enough,’ Rosie’s voice sounds angry. We need a break. She needs a break.’
My eyes open. The wind is loud. It lashes on the roof. I like that word – lashes Is this a new day? No, it’s not. Rosie is wearing the same clothes. So is Sam. He has soft hands. So has Rosie. Rosie loves me. I wonder if Sam loves me. I’m his Bonny Lass, he tells me that.
‘We need to check whether she knows Billy.’
Is Sam talking to me? He’s not looking at me. Billy? I know that name. My heart hurts. Something bad inside me is happening.
‘Just the one more photograph, that’s it. No pressure either. Am I clear?’ Rosie sounds angry again. She looks at Sam. Sam makes Rosie angry.
I nod my head. I think I’m going to be sick.
‘Remember, Veronica. Two squeezes for yes, is that alright?’
I squash his hand twice. His hand feels nice. Soft.
‘She’s alright, Rosie. See.’ He points at me.
I smile. He holds up the photograph. My heart hurts. Like someone is stamping on it.
‘Him!’ I slap my hand against my ribs. ‘Him!’
‘Is she saying Jim?’ Sam asks Rosie.
I shake my head. It hurts. I squeeze his hand. Once!
‘Bi…b—’
‘Billy?’
Speak words. I need words. I’m crying, I can’t stop crying.
‘He… he—’
‘Did he kill the girl?’ His eyes stare into mine.
‘Ye–s!’ Squeeze twice, squeeze twice.
‘Did you help him?’ His words hurt me, how could he think that?
Squeeze once, ‘No!’
I must not let go of his hand.
69
His eyes adjust to the gloom, the same gloom. It is as though he’s walked through time; so little in the kitchen has changed. He wants to smile but the muscles in his face tighten, his teeth clench.
Perhaps it will be easier than I thought…
His frozen fingers switch on the standard lamp, the dull yellow light flickers on, the same fringe hangs down from the silk shade, once olive green now a washy grey. He drinks it all in. The sagging settee, flock cushions, the long wooden table covered in ring marks. A pile of cards lies unopened on top of it. Pale blue, melamine kitchen units; the worktop bare of space. Littered with cups, bags of food, empty bottles of wine, used plates.
Thomasine Albright is as sloppy as Lottie.
The tin breadbin lies open-mouthed, battered metal cooking utensils hang from hooks on the wall. The pantry door cracked open a touch. A microwave and a large boxy shredder the only nods to 2010.
He remembers sitting on the settee as quiet as a mouse, waiting. The whole time knowing her mother and father slept upstairs, along with her younger sister. Outside, the dogs lay sleeping – drugged. He’d crushed up two of h
is grandfather’s sleeping tablets, mashed them in with their meat.
A damp rag lay hiding in his pocket. Karen stood in front of him, flushed of face, modelling his latest gift – a long brown, herringbone Biba coat. An expensive belated birthday gift that cost him four week’s wages. He told her she could keep it, all he wanted in exchange was a kiss. The effect was immediate. Eyes shut and arms resting by her sides, she’d puckered up.
Without hesitation, he snatched the cloth from his pocket, covered her nose and mouth with it. She’d not struggled, not really. As his homemade concoction filled her throat and lungs, her body collapsed into his.
Who knows what life we could have had if that stupid bitch hadn’t stopped me.
It occurs to him that his life has come full circle. The last thirty-seven years gone, not wasted but not lived to their full potential. Always on the edge of critical acclaim. Surely hiding his past for so long deserved some sort of credit. Four cases lay unsolved for over twenty years, he the answer to all of them – the police incompetent, not every girl can be a runaway. Yet he knew that each one had been classed so.
Thomasine Albright the Family Liaison for two of them, how ironic. How inconvenient.’ His foot hovers mid-step, he turns, closes the door behind him. Shuts out the wind and the snow.
He’s ready to escape from the boredom of his rural life, Lottie’s nagging, Carlo’s arrogance, painting wall-fillers. No doubt they’ll be surprised when they discover his real talent, that is if they ever do. It will appear obvious to all that look, that Lottie is complicit, she could have returned home at any time in the last twenty years. That’s what they’ll all think.
His face transforms, his eyes light up. This is another chance, he can be reborn, the phoenix rising from the flames, a new beginning. His lips contort in a smile, he already has a new name. He feels no anxiety, he’d been surprised at how easy it was to get a fake passport, the Lithuanians, marvellous forgers, eager to take his money. His wanderings around the north, and the internet, have brought many benefits. Drugs, girls, people sympathetic to his leanings, he could have anything he wanted. Just like the old days. And of course, his smile broadening, since he’d cleared out his bank account, he has much more money.
She Lies Hidden: a spell-binding psychological suspense thriller Page 29