by Sibel Hodge
‘Right. So, you’ve never heard from her at all, then, in the last twenty-five years?’ I asked, wanting to make quite sure so I could leave.
‘No. And I’m bloody glad. Useless cow.’ Her eyes glinted with steel and something else. Hatred, it almost looked like.
I took a step backwards towards the corridor. ‘Do you remember the letter she wrote you when she left?’
‘What about it?’
‘Do you remember what it said?’
She shrugged. ‘No. I ripped it up.’
‘But it was definitely Katie’s handwriting, though?’
She snorted. ‘Of course it was. Whose handwriting did you think it would be? The Queen’s?’
I was halfway through my morning patients when a thought struck me. Maybe I’d been surrounded by a clue to Katie’s whereabouts all this time and I’d never even realised.
What do you do when you leave a doctor’s surgery and move to another location? Katie would’ve had to register with a new practice at some point in the last twenty-five years. Even if she was perfectly healthy and never had a reason to see a doctor, she would surely have been having regular smear tests.
I typed in Katie’s name and date of birth. Before I started at the surgery all the old paper records had been transferred onto computer so it only took a few seconds for her name to ping up in front of my eyes.
It took another few seconds to realise that the last entry in the records was from when she was seventeen for a repeat prescription of the contraceptive pill, and no doctor or hospital had ever requested a copy of her records.
I sat back in the chair. No. That couldn’t be right, although there could be a good explanation. Maybe they’d been requested but someone had forgotten to add an entry. Or maybe the request had been written in the paper records but accidentally omitted when the information was added to the computer all those years ago.
My eyes scanned the screen, wondering if maybe a request had been filed at the beginning of her notes, rather than the end. I scrolled back through the most recent entries and turned the pages, going back in time. And that’s when I saw something disturbing.
From the age of eight, Katie had been treated for repeated bouts of cystitis and vaginal thrush and inflammation. Eight?
Sexual abuse was the first thought that popped into my head. I remembered Jack’s predatory looks. Katie’s promiscuity. She’d started having sex with boys at fourteen. I thought it was her way of trying to find love and attention when she couldn’t get any at home, but could it have been more than that? Was it learned behaviour? Had Jack been abusing her from an early age?
Then again it might mean nothing. Although vulvovaginitis, thrush and chronic urinary tract infections can be signs of sexual abuse, they can also be caused by other circumstances, such as lack of hygiene; using soap, shower gel, or bubble bath; diet; and taking antibiotics.
I bit my lip and stared at the screen. She’d been prescribed antibiotics for a couple of bouts of tonsillitis, and I knew her diet was pretty poor at home.
Was I looking for something that wasn’t there because I didn’t want to believe that Tom had killed and buried her like he’d told me?
Katie had never mentioned anything about Jack abusing her. But now I realised that she’d never said anything about a lot of horrible things that would’ve been going on in her life, and I was too stupid to understand back then. If I’d been her, I would’ve been complaining to my best friend about the state of them – that I had to fend for myself, get myself to school, wash my own clothes, make myself dinner, survive on pennies because both parents were living off their unemployment benefits and using most of it to buy alcohol – but Katie had never complained. She just got on with things. And that was how she survived, until she turned eighteen and left it all behind.
After my last patient I had a half-hour gap before Elaine came in and took over from me. There was no way I could call every single doctor’s surgery in the country trying to find any trace of Katie, but every patient was registered in the NHS database, and they would definitely have a record if anyone had ever requested her medical notes. For the first time in my career I found myself wishing a patient had had an operation or an illness over the years, just so I could try and find her.
I called the NHS records line and got through to a woman called Linda who I’d spoken to in the past. She checked once, and I made her recheck, but she still gave me the same answer.
Katie Quinn’s records hadn’t been updated or requested in the last twenty-five years.
My head was still spinning when I took Poppy out for a walk along Chesil Beach later. The pebbles crunched under my trainers as I stared out to sea, thoughts crashing into each other like the waves onto the shore.
Had Jack sexually abused Katie? Had she really written that goodbye letter or was it all a convenient cover-up? I had only Jack and Rose’s word that it even said she was running away. Maybe Jack had killed her and faked the letter. But if that was the case, why was Tom saying he’d killed her? Tom couldn’t stand Jack and Rose. I was sure he wouldn’t have had anything to do with Jack. So, what, then?
Tom’s words drilled into my head again. I was sure now that this wasn’t just a confused old man mixing up fragments of memories. Somewhere in those words was the truth about what had happened to Katie. A truth I had to find out.
Move over, Pandora. Katie’s box was about to be prised wide open.
Chapter Eleven
Nadia returned the favour the next night and had Anna over for tea. Nadia was making sweet and sour chicken balls and jasmine rice. From scratch, not out of a jar. I don’t know how she found the time. Lucas was on his way to New York on a two-day stop-over and Nadia said she wanted the company, although I’d forbidden Anna to talk about death row prisoners whilst she was there. Not only was it depressing, but I thought her latest obsession was a bit unhealthy. She’d been signing online petitions the last few days, trying to get the death penalty abolished in America! Luckily, she was distracted enough by the excitement of being able to go through Charlotte’s and Nadia’s stuff to search for anything they could give her for the car boot sale and hadn’t mentioned it once all day. Anna had always been a bit of a magpie. As a kid, she’d always loved anything shiny and sparkly, but she also had this urge to examine other people’s things. If we went to a new house she’d pick up people’s photos and ornaments and knick-knacks and study them, asking how they got them and if there was a story behind them.
So at 7.15 p.m. I was child free and standing on Chris’s doorstep with a lasagne still warm from the oven. The ragout and béchamel sauce was out of a jar, unlike Nadia’s, and the cheese came pre-grated, but, hey, it’s the thought that counts. And the jar stuff tasted much better than I could make on my own. Sometimes I wished I had Nadia’s talent for, well, for everything, really, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon unless I was body-snatched and replaced by a totally different entity. At any rate, I admit that I wasn’t delivering food on a purely altruistic basis: I had an ulterior motive for wanting to talk to Chris because he was the last person to see Katie after she left home, and I wanted him to jog my memory.
‘Olivia?’ Chris came to the door wiping his hands on a towel. ‘You OK?’ He gave me a concerned frown.
I smiled, holding up the dish. ‘Meals on wheels.’
He took a sniff. ‘Mmm, that smells gorgeous. Come in. I wasn’t expecting you.’
‘I know, but I was making dinner and made an extra one for you. Then I thought that since both Ethan and Anna weren’t at home we could eat it together, too. It’s not a bad time, is it?’ I suddenly remembered the woman I’d seen him with at the pub. ‘I mean, if you’ve got company, I can just leave it with you.’
‘No, course not.’ He stepped back and waved me in. ‘I was just about to stick a jacket potato in the microwave so this is an unexpected pleasure.’
&nb
sp; We sat in the kitchen at the sleek black ash table in the white kitchen that Abby had chosen when they’d first moved in together twenty years ago. In fact, the whole house had a black and white theme going on, with just splashes of colour here and there. I wondered how they’d decided who got what in the divorce. How did you divide things up into neat little bundles? You have the microwave and I’ll have the ornamental frog, you bastard! No, I want the frog, you bitch – you never loved it like I did! In that moment, part of me could understand Nadia’s reluctance to confront Lucas about his affair. It would mean the change of everything. Life as you knew it would collapse. And, yes, although you would get over it eventually, in the meantime you were looking at a whole heap of pain, heartache and stress. At least Chris and Abby hadn’t had any kids, although ironically that was the main reason for the breakdown in their relationship. Love could be a vicious and destructive thing sometimes. I didn’t realise then just how vicious and destructive.
Chris piled a huge serving onto a square white plate and set it down in front of me.
‘Whoa, that’s massive!’ I stared at it.
He shrugged. ‘Just eat what you can.’
I tucked my fork into the corner and broke off a piece.
‘That’s apparently what Mum always used to say to us, although I was too young to remember that.’ Chris sat down. ‘She’d give us gigantic portions of food all the time. Thought that we were growing kids so we should eat a lot. That’s probably where my being overweight stemmed from.’ He blushed, embarrassed. ‘I was pretty chubby as a kid.’
You’d never know it to look at him now, though. The years of building work and boxing had turned his body into a chiselled physique that any male fitness model would’ve been jealous of.
‘I went to see Dad again today.’ Chris took a bite of food and set his fork down, chewing.
‘I’m going to go tomorrow. How was he?’
‘Better than yesterday. He had more colour in his cheeks and he was sitting in the chair. He said he wanted to go for a walk and the staff were keeping him prisoner.’
‘A bit of exercise is good for him, actually.’
‘He may not have much time left. He should be able to do whatever he wants.’ Chris leaned his elbows on the table and clasped his hands together. ‘I hope he does have another heart attack.’ He caught my eyes warily, as if expecting me to get angry at that.
I reached out and laid my hand over his. ‘I think it would be kinder for him to go suddenly.’
‘But then I feel guilty for thinking like that. I shouldn’t want my dad to die.’ He pulled his hand away and picked up his fork again.
‘Don’t feel guilty, Chris. You don’t want him to suffer any more than he has to. That’s natural.’
‘I need a drink.’ He stood up and grabbed a couple of bottles of beer from the fridge. ‘Want one?’
‘Yes, please.’
He flipped off the caps and brought them back to the table. ‘I don’t know how Dad did it, you know. Looking after three young kids and running a company at the same time. I never once felt neglected or unloved. If I had a problem he was always there for me. The same with Nadia and Ethan. He was always running us around to various clubs. Me to boxing, Nadia to dance, Ethan to football. We always came first, you know.’ He tipped his head back and took a long sip of beer. ‘I mean, Nadia was great, too. More like a mum sometimes than a big sister.’
I took a drink and pushed my food away, my appetite vanishing suddenly. It was hard to equate the Tom that we all knew and loved with the Tom who could kill an eighteen-year-old girl. Almost impossible. And if I was finding it hard, how would Nadia, Ethan and Chris feel if I told them what I’d discovered so far?
‘You remember Katie?’ I picked at the label on the beer bottle.
‘Yeah.’ He sighed. ‘I feel guilty about her, too.’
My head snapped up and I locked my gaze on his face. ‘Why? Why would you feel guilty?’
‘She left the village because of me, didn’t she? Because I finished with her. I broke her heart.’ He stared down at the bottle in his hands. ‘She wanted us to move in together and get married and have kids and all that stuff, and I just wasn’t ready for it. I . . .’ He sighed. ‘We were too young.’
‘But you did you love her, didn’t you?’ I thought how different Katie and he were. She was the brash, mouthy, hard girl and he was the quiet loner. Still, didn’t they say opposites attracted?
‘Yes. I was gutted when she left. Even though I was the one who broke it off, it didn’t stop me loving her still. You can’t just turn your feelings for someone off. I thought maybe if she’d stayed we might’ve got back together later when she wasn’t trying to pressure me so much − when we were both a bit older and more ready for such a commitment.’
I thought about what Katie had said that last time I saw her, about fucking him again. ‘But you did meet up with each other after you split up, didn’t you? I mean, you were sort of seeing each other.’
‘No.’
‘You didn’t . . . you know?’ I raised an eyebrow.
‘What, meet up for sex?’
I shrugged. ‘Well, sometimes it’s hard to let go, isn’t it? You go back and forth a bit, confused, until you make your final decision.’
‘No. We never did. In the seven months after the split, I only saw her round the village a few times.’
‘But you were the last person to see her that day she ran away, weren’t you? Tell me what happened again.’
‘I told that policeman at the time. What was his name?’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s not important.’
Except maybe it was. ‘PC Cook?’
‘Yeah. It was really early and I was waiting for the bus to take me to the boxing gym. We’d been to the pub the night before to see some band. What were they called?’
‘The Jazz Iguanas or something.’
He laughed. ‘Yeah, that was it. Crap name. But I left early because I didn’t want to be too tired to spar the next day. Anyway, the Sunday morning Dad was supposed to be giving me a lift to the gym but he said he had something urgent to do so he couldn’t take me, and I remember seeing her walking past, coming from the direction of her house. It was awkward. Like I said, I’d only seen her a few times since the split, and even then not to say hello to because she was too far away. I didn’t know whether to stop her and talk to her, or whether it was better to just pretend I hadn’t seen her. In the end, I decided to say hi.’
‘Did she speak to you?’
‘She just stopped and stared at me for a moment. She looked really different. Her hair was short and she didn’t have all that heavy makeup on and her clothes were a bit . . . I don’t know, grannyfied. It was weird. I thought she was going to say something. Swear at me at the very least. Tell me to fuck off or something. But she didn’t say a thing. Then she just carried on walking.’
‘I vaguely remember you telling me all this at the time, but I can’t remember what happened next. Did you see where she went after you saw her?’
‘Yeah, she was walking towards your house.’
‘In Back Street?’ I asked, thinking about my parents’ three-bed cottage I grew up in, long sold now after they’d retired to sunny Spain twelve years ago.
‘No, Tate Barn. Well, it was our house then. Dad was renovating it at the time for us to live in.’
‘Yes, I remember when he was working on it.’
Since our house is the last in the village, she could only have been heading towards Abbotsbury, the next village along the main road, or cutting through the woods alongside the barn and hiking up over the hills. ‘So she was going to Abbotsbury?’
‘She must’ve been. That’s what that policeman thought, too. She was carrying a big rucksack. I didn’t think anything about it at the time, but then later, after I heard she’d left a letter and run away, it all
made sense.’
‘You’re absolutely sure?’
‘Positive. When I found out she’d left home I kept replaying the scene in my head over and over, wishing I’d done something differently. Said something to make her stay. I can even remember what she was wearing because she still looked beautiful to me, and, like I said, I kept thinking about it afterwards. Don’t you remember I used to bend your ear about it all the time?’
‘Yes, that’s right. You did.’
He stared off into the distance, lost in an old memory. ‘She had on some shiny black leggings and a big yellow button-down shirt. It looked strange, to tell you the truth. Nothing like she usually used to wear. And she was wearing these massive yellow hooped earrings and a silver necklace with a sun and a star on it.’ He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Then the bus pulled up and I got on. If I’d known it was the last time I’d ever see her, I never would’ve let her go.’
Chapter Twelve
I stood outside the old police house in the village the following day, mentally rehearsing what to say to PC Cook, or Mr Cook as he was now. He’d retired years ago and bought the house he’d lived in as a serving officer.
If Chris had seen Katie walking towards Abbotsbury with a large rucksack, then the letter she wrote couldn’t have been a fake and she must’ve really been running away. Which meant Tom couldn’t have killed her and he was just completely muddled.
But would Mr Cook remember what was in that letter?
I knocked on his door and looked around at the immaculate front garden. There were no prizes for guessing what Mr Cook had been doing in his retirement.
He opened the door and it was as if I was transported back in time to the day he asked me if I knew where Katie was, only this time our roles were reversed. I was on his doorstep and would be asking the same questions.