by Camilla Way
Some hours later she blinks awake with a start and gazes around in confusion. What had woken her? She’s still clutching her mobile and she notices that it’s illuminated, showing that she has a new text. Feeling stiff and cold, she wipes the sleep from her eyes then clicks it open, and then as she stares down at the image on the screen, her eyes widen in horror. The picture is of Cleo, lying on the floor of what looks like a van, her arms and legs tightly bound. She’s staring up at whoever’s taking the photo in pure terror. Horror courses through Viv as she tries to take it in. Beneath the photo is a message. Tell the truth about Ruby or your daughter will die. You have two days.
‘No,’ she whispers, ‘no no no no.’ Frantically she types her reply. I don’t know, I swear. She sends it, then immediately starts typing again. I thought I was telling the truth. I believed that you killed her. If I’m wrong I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. She hesitates then adds. I’ll put it right. I’ll tell them it wasn’t you. Please. Please don’t hurt her, she’s just a little girl.
She sits staring at her phone, willing him to answer. At last it comes. You have twenty-four hours to tell the truth. If you don’t, she will lose a finger. After that you have one more day. If you still don’t say who killed Ruby, Cleo will die. Call the police and I’ll kill her anyway.
Instantly she begins to search for DS Marshall’s number, then stops to re-read the threat. Call the police and I’ll kill her anyway. She thinks about what Jack did to his fellow inmate, how he’d left him in a coma, blinded in one eye. She remembers his cold, malevolent presence in their house. Jack was not someone who made empty threats; he was not someone whose bluff you called.
Her mind races. Wouldn’t the police be able to find him by tracking his mobile via phone masts or something? She dimly remembers reading that they could trace a phone to within a few miles. But that was still too wide an area for them to find Jack instantly. Could she take that risk? What if during that time Jack somehow knew she’d told them? What if he retaliated by harming Cleo – or worse? Her dealings with the police since she’d first reported the flowers and newspaper article hadn’t filled her with faith in their efficiency. Her longstanding fear of Jack, of what he might be capable of was too deeply ingrained and far more powerful than her trust in the police. Her mouth floods unpleasantly as though she’s going to be sick. She can’t take the risk, she just can’t.
She gets up to pace the room. If Jack didn’t kill her sister, then who did? ‘Think,’ she whispers. Through her panic she forces herself to focus. If she’s going to get her daughter back she needs to work on the assumption that Jack is telling the truth about his innocence. So who did kill Ruby? Who else had been in the cottage that day? There must be something, some vital clue that she’s forgotten.
She sinks onto Cleo’s bed, her head in her hands. Two other people had seen Jack shortly before and after Ruby was killed: their neighbour Declan Fairbanks and Morris Dryden. Morris had said that after he’d dropped off his delivery he’d gone back up the lane towards the village, passing Jack who was on his way to see Ruby. He’d turned to look over his shoulder and seen Jack knocking on their door. Another key part of the evidence had been the television programme Viv had been watching when she heard Ruby answer the door to Jack. This had been 1984, long before the days of TV on demand; they hadn’t even owned a VCR. The time of the television programme had matched that given by Morris when he said he saw Jack entering the house.
Then there was Declan Fairbanks’ evidence. In his early fifties at the time of the murder, Declan lived with his wife at the top of the lane. He’d testified that he’d been looking out of his window when he’d noticed Jack running towards the village from the direction of their cottage. Again, the timing of this had coincided with the programme Viv had been watching shortly before she went upstairs and found her sister’s body.
But if Jack was innocent, did that mean Declan, or Morris, or indeed both of them, had been lying?
The thought that Jack hadn’t killed Ruby seems preposterous … except, even as she thinks this, she is aware of a small shift inside her, as though a quiet voice whispers But is it? Is it so ridiculous after all? A vocalization of that strange nagging doubt that had always been there. Nausea rises inside her.
She closes her eyes and tries to remember Declan. A tall, well-built man in a suit, with greying hair and pale blue eyes. She has one solid memory of him – the time he shouted at her for accidentally kicking a ball at his window – and she remembers how he’d scared her, how he hadn’t appeared to like children much. She closes her eyes tighter, trying to focus. His wife had been a quiet, shy woman who rarely left the house.
Most of her childhood memories had, for more than thirty years, been locked behind a wall of panic. It had always been easier, safer, not to think about any of it. But now, though the anxiety rolls through her in sickening waves, she clenches her fists and forces herself to push through it.
And then, fleetingly, a new memory appears, a recollection of being very small, of opening a door to a room to find Declan on the other side of it, of standing stock still with shock to see him there. Viv opens her eyes in surprise. Where had that been? Which room? Each time she tries to grasp the memory, it slips out of reach. But it is the accompanying emotion that this memory triggers that makes her heart jump to her throat, the same creeping, sickening disgust that she experienced before in her dreams of him. What is she remembering? What had she seen? Not Ruby’s murder, she’s certain of that, but what? It’s no use: the memory has faded, and the more she tries to retrieve it, the vaguer it becomes.
She gets up. If Declan Fairbanks was in his fifties back then he would be quite elderly, possibly even dead by now. Even if he is still alive, would he provide any answers? She has to at least try to track him down. Her thoughts turn next to Morris Dryden. Had he lied about what he’d seen back then? If so, what part had he played in it? He’d been barely twenty then, so that would put him in his early fifties. His image is clearer than Declan’s; in her mind’s eye she sees a sweet, eager face with smiling eyes and curly brown hair, the red knitted vest he always wore. Stella has said recently he’d been in love with Ruby, that he’d invented errands just to see her. But he’d been a kind and gentle man – hadn’t he? At any rate, if Declan is dead, Morris might be her only hope of finding out the truth. She has to track them down. She has to find Declan and she has to find Morris.
Going to the window she peers out at the dark street below and checks her watch: 5.45 a.m., Monday morning. The police cars and reporters have gone; nothing stirs on the pavement below. Her mind made up, she hurries to the bathroom and splashes water on her face, then runs down the stairs, grabs her coat from the banister and leaves the house. Once in the street she glances quickly around before going to her car. She sits motionless behind the wheel, unable to shift the image of her daughter, bound and gagged, a look of terror on her face.
At last with shaking fingers she puts her key in the ignition, forcing herself to take long, even breaths. ‘You have twenty-four hours to tell the truth,’ Jack’s text had said. Starting the engine, she sets off for Essex.
14
The motorway when she hits it is almost empty and Viv speeds along, her Fiat 500 doing the best it can with her foot pressed to the pedal. She’s barely conscious of her surroundings and it’s only the cheery ‘ding’ and warning light on her dash to show she’s nearly out of fuel that makes her grudgingly slow down and turn off at a service station.
After she’s filled her tank she returns to her car, eager to get going, but when she glances at her watch she hesitates. It’s barely seven a.m. She would be in Essex in less than half an hour. Even if Morris still lives above the butcher’s, what is she going to do – drag him out of bed, demand he talks about events of over thirty years ago while in his pyjamas? Reluctantly she parks up then gets out and makes her way to the service station café.
Sitting at a corner table she sips her coffee and tries to get her thoughts into some
sort of order. If Morris or Declan had lied about seeing Jack before or after Ruby had died, then what had been their motive? She starts with Morris: what reason would he have had to send an innocent man to prison? Or had he simply been mistaken, got the timings confused because, as Stella had recently put it, he wasn’t ‘all there’. She thinks of Declan, the odd, sickly disgust that had struck her a few hours earlier when she’d tried to picture his face, but which she still can’t tie to any concrete memory.
She rubs her eyes, wishing she could turn to her mother, fearful that if she did Stella might try to talk her out of what she’s about to do, would probably insist that she go to the police instead. In her heart she’s certain that the only way to get her daughter back is to do exactly what Jack says. She looks at her watch. She has twenty-two hours before he carries out his first disgusting threat; forty-six to save her daughter’s life.
The sun has begun its steady climb to shine on another cold, bright winter’s day when she gets back in her car. Grimly she starts the engine and prepares to drive the remaining miles to her childhood home, in a village she hasn’t clapped eyes on for thirty-two years. As the countryside flashes past her, she remembers a time when Cleo was around five and had pointed at her framed photograph of Ruby. ‘Who’s she, Mummy?’ she’d asked.
‘She was my sister, your auntie,’ Viv had replied cautiously. She’d always known that the subject of Ruby would come up one day, but had hoped that Cleo would be a bit older before she had to explain such a sad and complicated tale.
‘My auntie? Like Layla’s Auntie Patience?’ Cleo had said excitedly. ‘Where is she?’
‘I’m afraid she’s dead, my love.’
Cleo’s green eyes had searched her face. ‘Why?’
Viv had hesitated. She would have to tell Cleo the truth one day, but not yet, not quite yet, she couldn’t bear to. ‘She … got sick, sweetheart.’
Cleo’s face had been full of confusion as she’d gazed at the photo of the pretty teenager in her hand. ‘I don’t want her to be dead,’ she said, and then, ‘will I die, too?’
And Viv had pulled her on to her lap and whispered, ‘Not until you’re very, very old. I will never let anyone hurt you, my darling. I promise.’ But she hadn’t kept that promise. She had failed, just as she had once failed Ruby and Noah.
Putting her foot to the pedal, she drives on until at last she comes to the exit for the village. Twenty minutes later, after following several twisting B roads, she approaches a brown sign which bears a name so familiar and evocative that it makes her throat catch. She progresses slowly, wonderingly, through street after unfamiliar street of new-build estates that must have sprung up in the three decades of her absence, more than doubling the size of the village she once knew. But as she nears the centre her surroundings become increasingly recognizable and she drinks it all in, everything her eyes fall on triggering memory after memory, snapshots steeped in colour and texture and emotion entirely buried until now beneath the weight of the intervening years.
There is the corner shop where she would go to buy her Sunday sweets; there is the laundrette that once nearly burned down in a fire, and there is the post office where her best friend’s mother worked. She passes her old primary school, her car almost slowing to a halt as she gazes in through the playground’s gates, every glimpse of Victorian brick wall, drinking fountain and climbing frame heart-stoppingly unchanged. Eventually, she comes to the village green where she and the other local kids used to play. She stops the car and gazes out, bombarded with memories of feeling hot and breathlessly happy, engrossed in a game of tag. A long-ago sensation returns to her of playing out far too late, knowing her mother will be angry with her but not wanting to go back home, longing instead to remain in the exciting freedom of the game, hoping when she returned to the cottage that Ruby would jump to her defence, the way she always did.
She sits and gazes at the daisy-speckled expanse of grass, the duck pond, the wooden bench, the huge oak tree where her kite once got stuck and Morris climbed up to retrieve it. She starts her car, driving slowly, gazing out wide-eyed, but when she passes the churchyard she instinctively looks away until she reaches the beginning of the high street. She isn’t ready to face her sister’s final resting place yet.
Getting out of the car she’s surprised at how much smaller and shabbier everything seems compared to the village of her memories. Some of the shops have changed – the Woolworths and dressmakers and hardware store are long gone – but many are still recognizable from thirty years before: the baker’s, the florist’s, the chemist. She passes the old tea shop that’s now a Gregg’s bakery and with each step feels the weight of sadness press more heavily upon her. When she spies ahead the Bird’s Nest pub her heart tightens: this was where Ruby had worked on Saturdays; where she’d first met Jack. Her unease deepens as a thought occurs to her. Are the Delaney family still in the area? They lived, she remembers, outside the village on the Colchester Road and she shudders at the thought that they might be living here still, that she might even happen upon them in the street. She would not know them if she did.
She keeps walking until she sees it: the shop that used to be Dryden’s Butchers. She stops and gazes at it for a while, remembering how it used to look. A sign with mustard yellow lettering, two square bay windows where the meat was displayed. She remembers a sandwich board outside with a pig in a butcher’s white hat and coat, the sudden chill and smell of fresh blood when you entered, sawdust on the floor. Morris’s dad, red-cheeked and white-jacketed, a tall, ruddy-faced man; Morris’s mum, a neat, blond-haired woman, motherly and quick to smile. And Morris himself, working behind the counter, running errands for his dad.
But Dryden’s is long gone. The sign is still there above the door, faded and almost illegible, but instead of sausages and chops the bay windows are filled with bric-a-brac and second-hand furniture; an umbrella stand, a parrot cage, a jumble of dusty books. She gazes in through the dirty windows but the place is closed and in darkness, a homemade sign on the door that says, Judy’s Junk. Back Soon, though it doesn’t look like it’s been opened in months. What happened to the Drydens? Are Morris’s parents dead? Has Morris moved away? She turns to gaze up and down the street, at what is so familiar but so changed, and wonders who to ask.
Cleo freezes in fear at the sound of the van doors opening. She’s been lying here for hours. The cord that binds her wrists is cutting into her skin, but she is so cold and frightened she barely notices. Her legs and arms ache with stiffness and she keeps drifting in and out of sleep; whatever he’d drugged her with earlier is not ready to let go of her yet. Suddenly the van doors open and there he is looming over her, shocking and terrifying in the blinding light. Though she recoils in fear he reaches down and hoists her out, letting her fall heavily, painfully, onto the ground.
Through her panic she sees plainly the builder’s yard he’s brought her to. Her eyes scan high fences, stacks of bricks, piles of scaffolding poles and mounds of sand. At the furthest end are two small old-fashioned caravans, hardboard nailed over their windows. There’s nobody around but she hears the sound of distant traffic. Next he unties the rope that binds her ankles and pulls her roughly in the direction of the caravans. When he unlocks the first one’s padlocked door, he gives her a hard push, following closely behind as she stumbles up its step.
Inside there’s a table, a bench that’s covered in the same orange scratchy fabric that also hangs as curtains at the boarded-up windows. It’s horribly cold and stinks of stale cigarette smoke, and something else, acrid and unpleasant; gasoline or turps, perhaps. ‘Sit down,’ he says, and it’s terrifying how different he is from the man she thought she knew, every cell of him altered beyond recognition. She starts to cry. ‘Please,’ she begs, ‘please let me go home.’
He makes no response but unties her wrists and from the wide pockets of his jacket he pulls out a greasy paper bag and tosses it onto the table in front of her. From his other pocket he pulls out the bottle of
water. ‘Eat,’ he says, and then he leaves. She hears him locking the padlock once more, but though she waits for it, she doesn’t hear the van’s engine start. He’s still out there somewhere and fear courses through her as she waits for his return.
As Vivienne stands in the street trying to decide who to ask for help, her phone rings. It’s DS Marshall, his voice tense on the other end of the line. ‘Vivienne?’ he says, ‘Where are you? We have officers at your door but you don’t appear to be—’
‘Have you any news?’ she interrupts. ‘Have you found Cleo? Or Jack or Alek?’
There’s a pause.
‘No? You’ve found out nothing?’ She closes her eyes in frustration.
‘Vivienne—’
‘I see,’ she says, cutting him off with a flash of white-hot anger. If they’d only taken her seriously when she first told them about Jack, they might have stopped him before he’d had a chance to get to Cleo.
‘Where are you, Vivienne?’ Marshall asks again.
‘I’m looking for answers,’ she tells him. ‘I’ll be back later.’
‘Vivienne, it’s important that—’ but she hangs up before he can finish, and when her phone immediately starts ringing she doesn’t pick up. She has little more than forty-five hours to save Cleo’s life; there’s no time to lose.
She crosses the road towards the newsagent’s shop. The bell rings when she enters and an Asian woman dressed in a sari and a neon yellow puffa jacket nods hello to her. ‘Can I help you, babes?’ she says, her Essex accent broad.
‘I hope so.’ Viv approaches the counter. ‘I used to live here a long time ago and I was wondering what happened to the Drydens?’
The woman stares back at her blankly. ‘The who, love?’
‘They owned the butcher’s across the road. They had a son named Morris.’
‘Oh right.’ She nods vaguely. ‘I’ve only been here five years or so, they’d long gone by then. That junk shop’s been there the whole time, though it’s hardly ever open. Waste of good retail space, if you ask me.’ She jerks her head in the direction of the Bird’s Nest. ‘You should try the pub, sweetheart, the landlord’s been here donkey’s years, though it’s run by his son now.’