by Kate Simants
Mae got out on the forecourt to do the honours. As he stood there, turbulence from the motorway billowing at his shirt, she wound the window down.
‘Shout us a can of pop?’
‘Sure.’
The window started to rise again, then paused, backtracked.
‘Buy you a proper drink when we finish, if you like.’
He made a vague shrug, not wanting to seem too keen.
‘Unless,’ she went on, ‘do you actually ever finish, though? Or do you just plug yourself in somewhere under your desk for a few hours?’
He tapped the last few drops of fuel from the nozzle. ‘I have a very healthy work-life balance,’ he told her. She looked at him for a moment, smile bitten off to one side and eyebrows raised, then scoffed gently and hit the window button again.
Mae jogged in and paid. When he got back in the car, Kit was just hanging up on the handsfree.
‘What was that?’ he asked, then, remembering, added, ‘The portrait?’
‘What?’ she said, turning the key.
‘From Lucy Arden’s. The painting of Jodie?’
‘Oh, that – no. It’s definitely signed Shevah but the only Shevah I can find is the rabbi at the synagogue down there. I’ve left messages. That,’ she said, indicating the phone, ‘was the hospital. You would not believe how fucking complicated their HR is.’
Mae narrowed his eyes. ‘As in, Helen Williams?’
‘No. She left. I’m on that too, actually. I think she was sacked, need to know why. But no, that was Christine’s manager.’ She pulled back out into the traffic. ‘Turns out we were right: she’s agency staff, and she does use a different name for work. Scott instead of Power.’
‘Weird. Why?’
‘Who knows.’ She overtook a string of lorries. ‘I had him check her shifts. She was working the night Matt disappeared.’
He cracked open the two-quid can of lemonade for her and handed it. She took it, frowning.
‘What are you thinking?’
After a mouthful she said, ‘Just something Ellie said. That she’d gone to see her mum at work, but it was in the middle of her shift, so she didn’t know where to find her.’
Mae gave a low whistle. ‘So she could have been anywhere.’
‘Shame their upgrade of security didn’t extend to actually keeping some kind of tabs on their staff. Might have avoided all of this.’ She took her eyes from the road for a moment, struck by a thought. ‘Corsham was new to the area, right?’
‘New-ish. We should probably check with Police Scotland, see if they’ve got anything we haven’t seen.’
But Kit kissed her teeth, dismissing it. ‘But we’ve checked his records. He’d have needed to disclose anything major to be working in a hospital at all, surely. One of those checks, Criminal Records Bureau or whatever it’s called now.’
Water bottle halfway to his lips, Mae froze. Looked at her. ‘DBS.’
‘Yeah.’ Then, ‘Why, what?’
‘I wanted to go on Bear’s school trip. My DBS has lapsed, so they said I couldn’t. You have to have a DBS to work with kids.’
‘That’s what I’m saying—’
‘No, look.’ He twisted in his seat. ‘Since she met Matt, Ellie started volunteering with the kids, in the hospital. She would have to have had a DBS to do that. But how?’
‘You just apply, don’t you? I don’t actually know, I’ve never—’
‘No. You need more than that. References, employers, background, traceable previous addresses, all of that. They can take months, especially if there are any gaps in the information. So when you bear in mind the Powers spent a long, long time hiding, after Jodie—’
‘How do you know?’
Mae paused, realizing what he’d said. But there was no way he was going to explain this without coming clean. ‘I tried to find them. More than once.’
‘Why?’
‘Just wanted to know Ellie was OK.’ He was glad Kit was driving, her eyes occupied by the road ahead. ‘The whole thing got under my skin. Badly, I mean, and—’
‘I know,’ Kit said, glancing over for just long enough to smile at him. ‘You don’t have to go into it.’
He looked away, out of the window. ‘It makes sense now, why they did that. If they’re really saying that Ellie killed Jodie, they’ve probably spent every day since looking over their shoulders. But the upshot was that they never had an official address. Ellie doesn’t have an NHS number, DWP, anything. It would have been nigh on impossible for her to get cleared to work with vulnerable kids.’
‘Unless someone helped her.’ Kit twisted the can into the holder behind the handbrake and increased her speed. ‘And why would someone want to help her get access to kids?’
Mae slowly rotated the cap onto his bottle. He was thinking about Cox. How only a few short hours before, he’d very nearly felt sorry for the guy.
‘Same reason someone with a proven interest in child pornography wanted sedatives out of the hospital pharmacy.’
60.
Mae
The Gayatri Institute was a well-kept, glass-fronted building on the corner of two smart streets near to East Molesey’s well-heeled main drag. Gauzy white curtains obscured the floor-to-ceiling windows of what Mae guessed was the main studio downstairs. No lights on, and no sign of any furniture or anything else in there. If Cox was in the building, he wasn’t advertising it. Turning around the side of the building it was possible to make out an empty reception room, neat and dark. Just up the road, with eyes on the only entrance, was a bright squad car sitting under an orange streetlight.
‘I thought we said discreet,’ Mae said as Kit pulled in bonnet-to-bonnet with it.
‘We did.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘They wanted to know whether our budget stretched to a newspaper with eyeholes cut out, but I already had my eye on a chip supper after, so I said no.’
She flashed the headlights and the shaven-headed uniform in the driving seat of the squad car, whose face had been underlit with the tell-tale blue of a smartphone, suddenly straightened. He got out of the car and came around to lean in to Kit’s open window.
Mae reached across her to shake the guy’s hand, trying not to brush his knuckles against Kit’s chest. ‘No sign of our man presumably?’
‘No one in or out, sir.’ His eyes zipped between them. ‘I offered to go down there and see if I could get an answer for you but—’
‘Glad you didn’t,’ Kit said. ‘I told your inspector we didn’t want to alert him before we got here.’ She was right: the last thing they wanted was Cox lawyering up before they’d even had a chance to say hello. ‘Thanks though.’
‘Any time.’
‘And the car?’ Mae asked. ‘He’s not been back to it?’
Two stiff shakes of his head. ‘Nope. Only way out of the building is that door there,’ he said, pointing, ‘and the gate next to it goes round the back.’ He gripped the edge of the rolled-down glass. ‘You sure you don’t want me to get in there for you? Got my big red key in the back,’ he added, miming the two handles of the battering ram he was clearly itching to use.
Kit laughed and hit the window-up button. ‘You’re all right, ta.’
Leaving the constable with strict instructions to stay where he was, Mae and Kit got out and walked back down the hill. Still no lights, no movement. They found the narrow passage behind the building, an old stone wall standing between them and what was probably a small courtyard or garden out the back.
‘Give me a boost?’ Kit said. Mae did as he was asked, linking his hands together and dropping onto a knee. She stepped on his palms and sprung up, scrabbled to hook her hands over the top of the wall.
‘Anything?’ Mae asked, squinting up at her.
‘Nope,’ she said, dropping down again brushing flaked paint off her thighs. ‘There’s a door into the building but no lights back there either.’
Mae got no answer from the intercom at the front. He stepped back to check again for movement at the upsta
irs windows when he buzzed it for the third time, but if Cox was in there, he wasn’t in the mood for guests. He motioned to Kit to follow him.
‘Time for our eager friend to get his favourite gear out,’ he said, motioning for Kit to follow him. ‘See if he can’t talk Cox into putting the kettle on.’
But after a few steps, he stopped. From inside, there was a series of electronic bleeps, an alarm being deactivated. Mae turned as the door opened, the prospect of a chase sending a leap of anticipation through his blood. But then he saw Cox’s face. Every feature of it was hollowed out, exhausted, stressed to the damp marrow. He opened the door as wide as it would go, and gestured them both inside with a tired sweep of his arm.
‘I don’t know what you’re looking for, and I don’t know what happens next,’ he said as Mae approached, ‘but I’d like to think it will be noted that I have brought this to your attention without any resistance of any kind.’
‘Brought what to our attention?’ Kit asked from behind Mae.
Cox said nothing, just gestured resignedly for them to follow him into the studio. It was completely empty, except for some rolled mats and foam blocks stacked up along one side. The front door closed softly behind them, and a drift of a breeze followed them into the room, nudging the fabric of one of the thin curtains aside. A scrap of moonlight glanced across the floor and was gone. The three of them squinted into the darkness.
‘This,’ said Cox, kneeling by what Mae could now see was a large bag on the floor. The doctor unzipped it, and stood up. Took a step back and stuffed his hands in his pockets.
It was a blue holdall, loosely packed with what looked to Mae like the sorts of things someone, a photography enthusiast, would take on a trip. A few clothes, a camera, a telescopic tripod. Mae tipped his head, then realizing what he was looking at, he instinctively put his arms out to the sides, a barrier in front of Kit and Cox, preventing them from moving forward, touching anything. Because right on the top of it, there was a plastic Ziploc bag.
Containing two fat, neat, side-by-side stacks of bank notes. Pink ones.
And without counting it, without even taking a step closer, Mae would have bet the farm that it totted up to something just shy of ten grand.
61.
Ellie
I went inside and the lights came on automatically. The unit was much bigger than I’d expected, the size of a small shed inside, maybe eight by six, with containers of various sizes stacked along one wall. Strip lights buzzed above me but there was no natural light.
I scanned the wall of unmarked boxes. had to fight the feeling I was being sidetracked: trying to discover what my mother was hiding instead of looking for Matt. But I had run out of leads. I had nothing else to pursue. I needed to join the dots. Everyone had secrets, something they had gone to great lengths to keep locked away: Matt, Cox, Mum. The whole thing, the common denominator, was me.
I slid the first boxes over to a space on the floor. Inside there were scripts, transmission documents from ITV and the BBC, sleeves full of research and notes in my mother’s handwriting: 1983, 1987, 1990. All work from her heyday, folder after folder of it. Guerrilla warfare in Colombia, massacre in Kenya. Famine in Ethiopia. A whole load of photographs: all centred on her, the person she had been before me. I didn’t know this woman at all. Mum grinning in sunglasses in front of what the note on the back told me was Ceaușescu’s palace; Mum looking serious into the camera with a horrifically malnourished child on her lap; a close-up of Mum speaking into the round ball of a microphone, eyes on whoever it was she was interviewing, out of the frame.
I chose the next box at random. It was sealed more effectively than the others, and I had to tear at the packing tape with my teeth to get it open. But the very first thing I found justified the effort.
A padded envelope containing old passports. I glanced at the images in them, my mother at nearly sixteen, then a decade older, then another. That lightning intellect sparking behind her straight-ahead, unsmiling eyes in all of them.
There were the stamps indicating her trips to the war zones of the 1980s: the Falklands via Argentina and later, Uruguay; Iran, Turkey. Returned back into the UK when the war ended. The next one was issued in 1992, the year I was born. I turned the page, expecting blank sheets from then on because I’d never been abroad. But there was another stamp, from 1995.
Bosne i Hercegovine – Bosnia. But how? And where was I when she made this trip?
As I closed the little booklet, I saw something else.
My name, beneath hers. The passport had been issued in the days before children needed ones of their own, although I’d never been abroad.
A moment resurfaced.
Me, at ten. A library book about Spain thrown against the wall, my face slick with crying. Still panting from the dying throes of a tantrum I was too old for. Mum explaining how we could never go abroad. Her hands on my knees, telling me how Siggy would come, and I wouldn’t cope with all the noise and the crushes and the crowds. There would be so many triggers on planes, we’d never get anywhere. I was too fragile to go on a plane; I always had been. It could never happen.
But here, on this document, was a contradiction. I flipped through it again, and yes, there it was under one of the stamps, in English. Entry x2. I’d been with her, on the way in, and on the way out. I would have been three years old. I let the thing drop into my lap and stared at the wall, trying to make sense of it. Was this the trip Mum had taken us on then, when she lost touch with Bernadette? Why Bosnia? Hadn’t there been a war on? I scrutinized it again, then put it aside, my whole head tight with confusion.
The next box held some of my things. Despite my efforts not to be sucked in, as I flicked though the box there were things that transported me, pictures I had drawn, tickets to films and museums I remembered wholesale, instantly. Under that, box files. I brought the top one onto my lap and opened it. It was full of envelopes, the addresses hand printed.
My handwriting. Not grown-up me. Adolescent me. The hairs on my arms lifted, and the silence in that dead-air room tightened like a shroud.
I lifted one at random. Addressed in careful letters to the Centre for Anxiety and Trauma Disorders, London. Underneath, another, this time for the First Person Plural, a mental health charity. I dug deeper, recognizing every one of these names. Great Ormond Street Hospital. Hope for Dissociative Survival. Young Minds. A thick, elastic-banded bundle of letters to different NHS Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services: CAHMS east London, CAHMS west London, CAHMS East Sussex, dozens of them.
All of the letters we’d worked on together. Asking for help, offering to volunteer for trials, to try to make me better, to understand Siggy. To make her leave me alone.
And every one of them was unsent.
Numb and confused, I started to put everything back. I didn’t even want to think about what it meant. Folders and boxes and binders, but there were too many and I hadn’t been careful enough. I had to completely unpack one box and start again, anxiety making steady gains on my breathing. I dealt with the envelope full of passports last, but as I returned the stack to the envelope, something bunched up in the bottom of it. I pulled it out.
It was a handwritten sheet, no envelope.
Chris, it started, scrawled spikily in letters that got bigger and bigger until the words at the bottom of the page were double the size of those at the top:
wearever the fuck you are. I want you to no, your not getting away with this. Im going to find you both I dont care how long it takes. That kid needs its dad and were supposed to be a family and thats what were going to be. Were good for each other. You think you can live your life without me and you cant I’m going to
Holding my breath, I turned it over. It was blank on the other side. That was it. Slowly, I folded it back up.
That kid needs its dad.
I dropped the letter, let it drift down on the top of the mess of files on the floor. Right then, from nowhere, a wave of fury swelled and broke in me.
I didn’t care that he was obviously an arsehole. I didn’t even care that he’d threatened her, threatened us.
She’d lied to me. I had trusted everything she said. And she’d lied. About her family, about the letters, about my father – about everything.
I kicked the whole pile. Papers and files cascaded up and against the opposite wall like a drift of dead leaves. Paper and files and all the pointless stupid bits and pieces of shit from a childhood I didn’t even know any more.
I grabbed Matt’s hoody, bundled my face into it, and screamed. Then, sobbing, I got up. Started stuffing everything into the boxes without any consideration of order. She’d come here and she’d know I’d seen it all. I didn’t care. I grabbed her precious archive by the handful, the armful, shoving everything into a corner. When I finished, panting, I laughed. She’d be furious. The passport was still on the floor, open at the page with the Bosnian stamp. I stooped to collect it.
It was as if everything went quiet. There was a tiny shield I hadn’t noticed before, next to the lettering. The same shape and stars design as the one on the paper I found in Cox’s drawer. I was cold, suddenly, but not just cold. In my mind, at the very end of a long, dark corridor, a light went on.
Siggy’s eyes flew open. She pinned me still, drilling something into my head. The answer was right there at the edge of my grasp, the cogs of it grinding so hard I could almost hear it. Bernadette and my mother, my mother and Cox, Cox and Matt, Matt and me, me and Jodie. None of the teeth fitting. Everything jammed up, the gears slipping and failing.
I leaned back against the wall, put my hands in my pockets, and closed my eyes. I gave myself a count of twenty, the way Dr Cox used to tell me to do. When I opened my eyes again, I had the answer.
I sniffed hard and wiped my face. Then, clearing a space in front of me and from my pocket I slid the folded, yellowing document from the envelope I’d taken from Cox’s files, and although the words meant nothing to me, I studied the whole thing. Right down to the handwritten words on the scored line: names, possibly? Mubina above and Idrizovic below.