by Emily Gunnis
‘Why did you feel the need to leave school today without permission?’ asked DI Gibbs, jolting her back into the present.
‘I went to say goodbye to Harvey,’ Rebecca said quietly. She was shaking now, her whole body starting to go into shock.
‘Because you were moving away?’ Gibbs waited for her to nod before scratching her words out on the paper.
‘He was baling at Greenways Psychiatric Hospital. They have a farm the patients work on. Harvey and his father stay at the local pub in the week so I knew I wouldn’t see him before we left.’ Rebecca closed her eyes and let out a slow breath, trying to ease the nausea.
‘We are smitten, aren’t we?’
‘Ted and Harvey are like family to me. They took my mother in when I was a baby and my father was sent to Greenways. We would have been on the streets without them.’
DI Gibbs nodded slowly. ‘And how did you get to Greenways after sneaking out of school?’
‘I got the bus.’
Rebecca’s stomach throbbed. The sanitary pad in her knickers was irritating her skin and she was sure it needed changing, but she had nothing with her other than the nightie on her back. She hated what her body was doing to her – the mess, the pain of it, not just in her tummy but in her back, her legs. She hated the hairs between her legs, her growing breasts, sore and ever present. She didn’t want her body to change and had no use for any of it. She knew that, unlike the other girls in her class who were already giggling over the prospect of marriage and children, the idea of it filled her with horror.
‘Don’t get married, Rebecca, it’s a mug’s game,’ Mother had whispered one evening as they peeled potatoes for dinner. ‘I’ve put some money in an account for you for medical school.’ She had looked out of the kitchen door to where Jacob was reading the newspaper, then back at her. ‘There’s no need to tell anyone about it. Promise me, whatever happens, you’ll finish your studies.’
She had startled as her mother pulled a post-office booklet from the back of the kitchen drawer and pressed it into her hand. She felt herself beginning to cry, all the tension that forever filled the house pressing down on her.
‘Promise me.’
‘I promise.’
It had started the day he came home from Greenways and she had looked over at her father, his dark, brooding eyes glaring at her, a forced smile etched onto his scarred face.
‘Why, Mummy? Why does he shout at you and hurt you?’ The knot in her stomach this stranger had inflicted was already having an effect on her sunny fearlessness. A black cloud now followed her everywhere she went. She loathed being alone with him and cowered behind her mother’s legs whenever he emerged from his bedroom, bleary eyed and foul tempered.
‘Things are going to have to be different at home from now on, little one, because Daddy’s a bit sad and frightened from fighting in the war. And you have to be there for the people you love, even when they’re not being as kind and nice to you as you’d like them to be. He’ll be better soon.’
At the age of five, life as she had known it had ended. Their carefree, fun-loving home became a prison overnight. The sounds of laughter, the smells of the sea breeze through the open windows, the sand pockets over the kitchen floor, the music on the wireless. As he came in through the door, her mother’s heart went out.
‘And what happened when you got to Greenways?’ asked DI Gibbs, leaning forward to picking up a now-cold cup of coffee.
Rebecca thought back to the previous afternoon. The biting cold had snapped at her when she stepped off the bus, as if warning her to turn back. With butterflies in her stomach, she had walked towards the three-storey Gothic building at the edge of Chichester. The high wrought-iron gates a threatening reminder that once you were in, it was near-impossible to get out.
Soon after the gates had slammed shut behind her, a clean-shaven man had walked up to her, blocking her path, his eyes averted.
‘What is your date of birth?’ he asked rocking gently from one leg to the other.
‘Don’t be shy. Tell George your date of birth and he’ll tell you the day of the week you were born.’ With relief she had turned to see Harvey smiling at her in his mud-soaked dungarees, his blond hair flopping in front of his blue eyes.
‘Okay. I was born on 8th January 1947.’
To her amazement, George, without a moment’s hesitation, blurted out, ‘Wednesday.’ Staring at her, he added, ‘You’re the girl in the painting.’
‘That’s incredible. How does he do that?’ said Rebecca. ‘What painting is he talking about?’ she added, frowning.
Harvey shrugged. ‘George has a brilliant mind, but he’s totally institutionalized. He would never survive outside these walls now.’
‘It isn’t how I imagined it would be – I thought everyone would be locked away.’ She had tried not to stare too much, but her curiosity got the better of her. The biting cold was making her shiver.
‘Well, the ones wandering around are the ones the doctors think should be kept occupied with physical activity, but the ones who are psychotic, who are a danger to themselves or others, they’re locked up in Ward B, up there,’ said Harvey, pointing to the dozens of arched windows staring down at them from the façade of the main building.
‘Anyway, what are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be at school?’ Harvey led her out of the bitter wind through the door and stood at the end of a seemingly never-ending corridor which looked like the stuff of nightmares. There was a tension in the air, and she could hear what sounded like a woman screaming for her life.
‘I found Harvey and told him we were leaving,’ Rebecca said quietly now to DI Gibbs.
‘And what did he say?’ He looked up from his notes and glared.
Rebecca paused. ‘He said he would come to Seaview tonight and we would run away together.’
She could see him now, staring at her with his baby-blue eyes. ‘But Seaview Farm is your home. Your dad would be lost without you.’
‘He can cope. He knows how much I . . . I care about you.’ Harvey kicked the soil at his feet.
‘Where will we go? What about school? If I go with you, I’ll never finish my studies and I’ll end up just like Mother.’ Tears of panic stung her eyes.
‘And what did you say to that idea?’ Gibbs leaned forward, glaring at her intently, his cigarette breath sucking at the oxygen in the room.
‘I said I couldn’t leave my mother,’ said Rebecca as another tear escaped. She was afraid to cry; if she started, she would never stop.
‘So you left?’ asked DI Gibbs.
Rebecca nodded.
‘But when we arrived at the house tonight, you said you heard someone at the door, before you came downstairs and found your mother and father. And that this person you heard started the argument that led to your parents’ deaths. Do you think that person was Harvey?’
‘No.’ She could still hear her bedroom windows, shaking in the relentless gale as if they might smash, the rat-tat sound of the door knocker which must have been the howling wind.
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because when I went downstairs there was no one in the house. I must have imagined it. He and Mother argued all the time. There was a storm, battering at the windows, I couldn’t hear properly.’
‘But you said you heard your father speaking to someone, and that an argument broke out. Wouldn’t it make sense that this person was Harvey, if he said he was coming for you?’ Gibbs leaned in further and Rebecca felt her body tense and her stomach spasm again.
‘No.’ Rebecca shook her head. She had to get out of this room. She couldn’t breathe. She could smell the burning fumes from the Luger pistol when it went off.
‘Why?’
‘Because Harvey would never have left my mother dying on the floor like that. He loved her.’
‘Could he have shot your father to save your mother?’
‘No.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because I know. He couldn’t
do something like that. Please, sir, I really am going to be sick.’
‘Well, luckily for him, his father is an alcoholic, so there are witnesses to say they were both at the King’s Head tonight.’
‘So why are you asking me this? Why won’t you let me go? Please, I feel very unwell.’
Rebecca felt vomit rushing up from her stomach.
‘Because I’m not sure you’re being entirely honest with me, young lady. I think you’re holding something back. And that you have an idea of who was at the door.’
The tears started now. She began to panic that she was going to choke on the vomit burning at the bottom of her throat. ‘Please sir, there was no one there when I went downstairs. No one else was in the house.’
‘And your father kept a pistol?’
Rebecca nodded, putting her hand over her mouth as the sounds of the night screamed in her ears.
She had put her head under the covers, as the storm picked up its pace, echoing what was happening downstairs. The sound of yelling, smashing glass, her father’s fury thudding through her veins, feeling it as if it were her own. She had lain in her bed, paralysed with indecision, until her mother’s screams came through the floor, forcing her to act, to go to her. ‘Mother!’ She had shouted to her, opening her bedroom door and launching herself down the stairs towards the horrific scene unfolding in the room below.
Her mouth was filling with vomit now and, as it began to pour through the fingers covering her mouth, the acid in her stomach burning, she gagged and bent double.
DI Gibbs shot up, but it was too late: it was all over his notes, the table, the floor. As bits of the last meal she had eaten with her mother – their final supper, at which no one had said a word – covered the detective’s black shiny shoes, and the last of the air in the room became wretched, their interview finally came to an abrupt end.
Chapter One
Harvey
9 a.m. Wednesday, 19 November 2014
Harvey Roberts walked over to the window of his farmhouse kitchen and looked out beyond the ice-covered courtyard to the South Downs. He had only been up for a couple of hours but he could still barely walk from exhaustion after spending the past two days holding his daughter’s hand through her labour. When he had finally got home to his bed he’d barely slept, spending most of the night worrying about her. He took a glug of coffee and resolved to gather his strength for another long shift at St Dunstan’s Hospital.
It had been a harrowing couple of days. His daughter had gone into labour three weeks before her due date and, as Jessie’s boyfriend, Adam, was in Nigeria on a photoshoot, it was Harvey’s phone that had rung at 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. He had dressed quickly and driven into Chichester, where the last of the Saturday-night revellers were still making their way home. When Jessie opened the door to her and Adam’s two-bedroom period flat, she was already out of her pyjamas and dressed.
‘I think it’s started, Dad,’ she said, looking less like the thirty-nine-year-old features writer she had become and more like the little girl he used to comfort after a bad dream. Her shoulder-length highlighted hair, normally blow-dried into a sleek bob, was scraped back into a ponytail, her porcelain skin free of make-up and her green eyes framed with tortoiseshell glasses.
They had stood by the large sash windows in Jessie’s lounge, staring at one another in shock. ‘I haven’t even left work yet,’ Jessie had finally said. ‘And the nursery isn’t ready, there’s no food in the flat.’ Her eyes slowly filled with tears. ‘Adam isn’t due home for another week. I can’t get hold of him. I can’t do this without him.’
‘It’s all right, sweetheart,’ he had offered. ‘I’ll track him down. He’ll be here in no time – it might even be a false alarm.’ Instinctively, he had said the words she wanted to hear, even though he knew it was probably a lie. ‘Maybe we should take you into the hospital, just to get you looked at. Have you packed a bag?’
‘It’s all gone wrong, Dad. We haven’t even set up the birthing pool yet,’ Jessie said, looking over at the box still sitting in the hallway. ‘I just rang my midwife and she said, because it’s so early, I have to go in. We had it all planned – we wanted to have the birth at home, we didn’t want to go to hospital.’
After that she seemed to go into a state of heightened anxiety from which, Harvey felt, she hadn’t yet come down. He put his arm around her and told her it was okay, that if she could just sit on the bed and point to where things were, he could grab a few bits.
But everything he suggested was wrong: dresses and cardigans rather than pyjamas and sweatpants, her iPad rather than her birth plan, which she and Adam had spent hours over and which Harvey now couldn’t find. And she was in too much pain to sit still. She paced up and down, snapping at every suggestion, until they finally cobbled together the things they needed to take.
‘What about your toothbrush?’
‘Okay,’ she managed, before putting her hand out against the wall to let out a wail of pain. Harvey had rushed into the bathroom and grabbed it. The cabinet was open and his eyes fell on the box of Citalopram, the antidepressant Jessie had been taking since her stepmother died two years ago.
‘I’ll throw these into the bag, shall I?’ he said, walking out of the bathroom towards her.
Jessie shook her head. ‘I stopped taking it – my midwife said I couldn’t breastfeed on them.’
Harvey’s stomach plummeted. It had been a rollercoaster of grief for both of them, and Jessie had only made it through because of a great deal of counselling and the lifeline which was Sertraline. ‘Right,’ he managed, knowing it was too late to say anything else. ‘Did your midwife talk to you about bottle feeding? It didn’t do you any harm.’ Harvey attempted to hide his rage with a smile.
‘No, Dad,’ Jessie snapped. ‘I want to breastfeed. It’s best for the baby. I’d been thinking about coming off it anyway. Adam says I don’t need it any more.’
Harvey stood in front of his daughter in stunned silence. He felt that Adam had no idea of the depths to which Jessie had sunk after Liz, the woman who had been like a mother to her since she was a baby, had died, and to encourage her to come off her medication when her baby was nearly due and he was away with work only served to prove it.
But as he went to say more, to implore her to reconsider, he could feel Liz’s hand on his arm, pulling him back, stopping him. So instead he said nothing. In the absence of his wife’s guiding hand, he felt paralysed.
Indeed, from the minute Jessie had opened her front door to him he had felt his wife’s death rush back to him. It was as if he was being told the news all over again. He knew Jessie was feeling it too: anger over their loss hung in the air between them; anger that they were having to cope without her; that, as always, he was clearly not up to the job.
As they left the flat, in silence, it had occurred to him that Jessie would have told her stepmother if she was thinking about stopping the Citalopram. It would have been mentioned over a cup of tea or during a Sunday-afternoon walk and Liz would have found a way to talk her out of it. Sertraline had made Jessie forget how bad she had been – the anxiety attacks, the OCD; all the things that had been at their worst before Adam came along a year after Liz’s death. Now, the potentially catastrophic decision had already been made and it was too late for Harvey to do anything about it.
‘Owww!’ Jessie had cried as they passed the out-of-order sign by the lift and began walking down. With each wave of pain, she stopped, clutching the wooden handrail of the three flights of stairs to Harvey’s car.
As Harvey looked on helplessly he thought back to the night he’d tried to broach the subject of she and Adam moving somewhere more practical. They had invited him round to dinner in Adam’s immaculate flat which Jessie had moved into when she fell pregnant only six months after meeting him. After telling him they were having a girl and a great deal of congratulatory hugging and crying, he had suggested that, perhaps, if they wanted to look at a house, so that Jessie wouldn’t have to
struggle on the stairs with a buggy, or deal with noise from the nightlife in Chichester town centre, he could remortgage and help them out with the deposit.
Jessie and Adam had looked at each other and, within seconds, Adam had dismissed his offer. They loved their flat, he said as Jessie cuddled into him on their cream sofa with its matching, perfectly arranged cushions. They didn’t want to be one of those couples who moved out of the area they loved and were miserable because of it. The baby could fit in with their life, Adam had added. Jessie was planning to go back to work before too long; nothing needed to change. Jessie had looked at Adam and then smiled at him, the same smile she gave as a child when Harvey asked her how her day at school had been and she tried to hide the fact that the class bully had upset her again.
Harvey had looked round at their elegant flat, each wall and surface white, nothing out of place. Pictures Adam had taken in his work as a travel photographer had been framed, blown up and hung on every wall. Everything had been arranged and mapped out as carefully as their lives. He couldn’t picture it: the baby food, the mess, the sleep deprivation. Adam’s work meant he was away a lot but when he was home they pleased themselves – ate out, wandered around the shops, sat on the beach. Then, when they started to niggle one another and it all got too real, it would be time for him to go off again to far flung places. And Jessie would throw herself back into her work which – if she had an event or a client dinner – could mean twelve-hour days. To him, she never seemed to stop, lugging her bump on the train up to Victoria and back every day. There had been little effort to stop, slow down even, and take in the life-changing event that was about to happen to them both.