by Kate Simants
And then, from the zipped inside pocket, I pulled out my baby photo, the one Matt had in his boat. I placed the photo on top of the document, lining up their top left corners. Bright lights danced in front of my eyes, and I found I was holding my breath.
They both had rust marks, and the rust marks matched.
Once, a lifetime ago, they could have been stapled together.
62.
Mae
Mae drove while Kit slept open-mouthed but silent, having talked him into driving her home. They’d left the local SOCOs on site after Cox had been cleared for transfer to Brentford. Now, under a smooth onyx sky, with open roads ahead of him and his veins full of caffeine, he had some time to think.
Item one was Cox. Although neither he nor Kit wanted to be the first to admit it, once he was bagged and tagged in the back of the squad car, they’d agreed that his performance when he’d let them in was serious Oscar material. So was he just an even better bullshit artist than Mae had thought? Or was he telling the truth?
Items two and three were Christine and Ellie. Neither had answered their phone since teatime. There was a uniform stationed outside their flat on strict instruction to alert him to any sight of them, but so far, not a peep.
And item four – item four was the handwritten note they’d found at the bottom of the baggie full of twenties.
On the inner orbital, things started to slow up a little, and Kit stirred, opened one eye and closed it again. She lifted her hand and wiped at the corner of her mouth with a knuckle.
‘Where are we?’ she croaked.
‘Slight detour. Go back to sleep.’
It was gone one by the time he pulled up and killed the engine. He considered waking Kit, but decided to go this one alone. As near to silently as he could, he opened the door by degrees and closed it behind him with a click. Through the window he saw Kit frown in her sleep, then shift and settle.
The street was deserted. His breath steamed white as he pushed the little garden gate. A frame of light glowed around the curtained window in the front room of the house, and he rang the doorbell once, twice, then again. Inside, the sound of the TV fell silent, and there were footsteps, and then the door opened.
And there stood Helen Williams, her dishevelled hair in a backlit halo and her eyes smudged dark from half-shed make-up.
‘Oh,’ she said, sighing heavily as if she’d expected him hours ago. She stood aside to let him in. ‘It’s you.’
She studied the picture on his screen with a blank, haggard face, then handed his phone back and sank into her jumbo-cord sofa. ‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,’ Mae told her. ‘I’m going to assume there was a good reason that you didn’t tell me about this before.’
‘I don’t know,’ she said finally, looking up at him.
‘No?’
‘No.’
Mae closed the photo of the note they’d found folded in half under the cash in Matthew Corsham’s bag. Handwritten, black ballpoint on an NHS comp slip. A simple message:
… And I never even want to hear your name again, you piece of shit.
‘Is that standard wording, when you let someone go?’
She let her head drop back and screwed up her eyes, but she didn’t reply.
‘I mean, for example,’ Mae went on, ‘is that what they said to you when you got the sack?’
Her eyes flew open, but he raised a finger before she had a chance to reply.
‘There were no pastures new. You did get the sack, Helen, we don’t need to argue about that.’
She looked at him miserably. ‘What did they say?’
He shrugged. ‘I’ll be talking to your boss in the morning. But I’m here asking you, now.’ He put the phone away in his jacket pocket, and waited.
Tucking her slippered feet under her, she raked her fingers through her hair and laughed. Mae glanced at the bottle of wine on the table. A few inches from empty, one glass. Not that he blamed her. Judging by the label on her Sauvignon, this was a woman accustomed to the finer things: good wine, great clothes, a personal trainer, probably. As of that afternoon, she was probably staring a defaulted mortgage in the face. It was a bad day in Helen Williams’s world, whatever way you looked at it.
‘All right,’ she said at last. ‘I’ve got a reason I didn’t say before. It’s just not a very good one.’ She slipped the rest of the wine into the glass, and told him all about it.
Six months earlier, the children’s wing had had an inspection. There was nothing significantly wrong with the provision of care, Williams told him, and the medical side of what happened there wasn’t down to her anyway.
‘What they kept coming back to, again and again, was that the kids were bored. The long-term inpatients were falling behind socially, as well as all the rest of it. There wasn’t enough for them to do, and their mental health was suffering.’ She took a mouthful of white, suppressed a ladylike burp with the back of her hand, and placed the glass on the table, too near the edge. Mae’s fingers itched to right it.
‘And then all of a sudden everyone cares. Everyone’s giving me grief about it, saying we have to boost activities, we have to offer enrichment and pastoral care and all this bullshit that no one wants to spend any money on.’
‘How was that your job, though?’
‘Ex-fucking-zactly,’ she said, reaching for the glass again and tilting it at him precariously. ‘Exactly the question. It’s my fucking job because I’m the one who gets the free resources. The humans.’
‘Volunteers.’
‘But people don’t want to do it, you know? They like the idea of helping little children, they like the idea of telling their friends that they’re reading to the kiddies in the hospital, but when it comes down to it, very poorly kids give people the heebie-jeebies. We get people starting off with good intentions, then time wears on and they stop turning up, they find they can’t commit the time they thought they could. Excuses, net result being that the issue persists. Kids are miserable. And I do care,’ she said, waving a finger at him accusingly, ‘whatever you might think of me. I’ve got a heart of gold. I have.’
She waited for him to concur.
‘Go on,’ he said.
A big sigh. ‘So I was getting desperate, badgering everyone I knew. Word got around I suppose because after that we got a few people in.’
‘Well done you.’
She eyed him blackly. ‘Yeah well. Then there was the usual wait for the checks, and then we got another date for the interim inspection and the pressure just got …’ Trailing off, she sighed, shook her head. ‘And then Matthew Corsham turned up in my office. Three, four months ago, I can dig out the date. He had someone for me. Ellie Power. She wanted to come and volunteer nearly every day. She’d already got DBS forms, so she could start right away.’
‘And that was a problem?’
‘It wouldn’t have been any kind of problem if the forms hadn’t been faked.’
Mae looked up. She met his eye.
‘You didn’t check?’
‘I didn’t. I absolutely did not suspect a thing, at the time. Then a few months later I got a call from this psychotherapist, not one of ours.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
She screwed up her eyes, then shook her head.
‘Dr Cox?’ Mae ventured.
‘Yes. Cox, that’s right. He wanted to know about Ellie, how she was interacting with the children. I wasn’t going to discuss her with him, it would have been massively against policy, so I said no, obviously—’
‘Obviously.’
‘Yeah, all right. I said I could pass his details to her if he wanted, but he made some excuse and hung up. So that was a huge alarm bell. I dug her forms out and pieced it together. Realized what I’d done. I went straight down to the lab, confronted Matthew about it because he’d set the thing up in the first place, and he said, he’d keep quiet about it if I would.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Meaning I had more to lose.
Yes, he’d faked the clearances, but I should have checked. It was my arse on the line.’
‘So you buried it.’
‘I didn’t bury it. I slimmed down her shifts. Down to one a week, and I planned it so her last one would be this week. I really thought that would be the end of it. But then we got the tip-off, about the—’ she paused, glanced away, ‘the drugs. Then they dug everything up and then that was it.’
‘But it wasn’t just the drugs, was it?’
She reached out to upend the bottle into the glass, found it empty, shook it, and set it back on the table with a crack.
‘Helen.’
‘No. OK? You happy? No, it wasn’t just the drugs. We had an anonymous email, someone telling us they knew Matthew Corsham had pornographic images on his computer, and they’d confronted him and he said he’d delete them. The caller said they wanted to be sure, so they broke into his locker, and found the drugs.’
‘And it was my lookout, wasn’t it, because I’d taken him at his word. I’d done my best to hide it, pretend the computer thing hadn’t happened, but it wasn’t enough. Now he’s just disappeared, and I’m utterly fucked, all for the sake of a bunch of kids having someone play fucking snap with them.’
He tried to muster some sympathy, but he came up short. ‘Did you know why he faked them?’ Mae asked her, counting up the possible reasons as he said it.
She gave a little shudder and looked away.
‘Did he use her to get on the ward himself, Helen? To get access to the kids?’
Almost inaudibly, she said, ‘I don’t know.’
Meaning with all the resources at her fingertips, the CCTV, the logs from keycards, the people she could have asked, she had chosen instead to turn her back and hope that she didn’t get caught.
‘Don’t just stand there staring at me,’ she told him, then she let out a groan and buried her face in her hands.
He could, at that moment, have made an attempt to make her feel better, let her know that anyone might have done the same, that it was an error made under pressure. But then he thought of Cox, and Jodie Arden, and all those pictures of other people’s children. Those pictures of Ellie. So he stayed where he was.
63.
Ellie
I awoke into pitch blackness, panic firing like Catherine-wheel sparks in all directions. The thin, rough carpet was doing a bad job of disguising a cold cement floor under my hip, but reminded me where I was. The storage unit. No windows, neither daylight nor moonlight. I’d fallen asleep.
I got to my feet, still dizzy from sleep, and waved my hands around to trigger the sensor for the lights. Squinting against the sudden brightness, I checked the door, first – shut and locked – then checked my hands, my arms. My shoes were still paired neatly by the door. No sign that I had been out. No sign that I had been up.
Siggy was silent and still, just a shuddering little crouch of something, balled up in my stomach. I had an urge to reach in and cradle her, and in the wake of that, a terrible sadness. How unbearably alone she was.
She had hardly stirred in the last couple of days, like an elderly cat. There, alive, but only just. A year ago, a week ago, I would have thought I’d be relieved, but there was no victory in it. She had always been there, and now I was … alone.
And I missed her.
I opened the door for a moment to see if it was morning: the corridor outside was flooded with thin daylight. Then I turned my phone back on. Battery almost gone, but it was long enough to discover I had half a dozen voicemails.
Not Matt. Mum.
I think they know. Don’t go to the flat.
We have to leave. I’m waiting at our special place. You have to come, please.
Where are you? I can’t bear you being gone.
You are breaking my heart. Please call. I’m waiting for you.
You can’t do this on your own.
I deleted each one of them, but when I came to the last I heard a different voice. It was Bernadette, a short message just asking for a return call.
She picked up on the first ring.
‘I found something I need to show you. Photos.’ Then, quickly, ‘it’s not going to be … like before. Nothing with the uniform.’
She was going to work in Ealing that morning, she said. It wasn’t far from where I was. We agreed to meet in an hour, and I ended the call.
Kneeling, I lined everything up. The passports. My baby photo. Cox’s document. The phone bill, the letter from my dad. I looked at it like that, spread out on the floor like a Kim’s Game, until the idea took shape. I fitted the whole lot into an empty plastic envelope, buttoned it into a pocket, put the hoody and my shoes back on, and got out of there.
Bernadette was there before me. It was still early, not even half seven, and there were only a handful of customers. She was sitting at a small booth table stirring slow circles in her grey-looking tea. She straightened as I sat down opposite her, almost as if she hadn’t expected me. If she had noticed my dishevelled appearance she didn’t show it, but she didn’t look as if she’d slept well herself.
‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ she said with a weak smile, pushing the cup away and lifting a bag onto the table.
‘Before you do,’ I said, stopping her. I wanted her to see the letter: The kid needs its dad. I unfolded it and slid it across the desk.
She looked it over, biting her lip, then looked up at me.
‘Is that his writing?’ I asked her. ‘My—’ I paused, not quite able to call him my dad. ‘Jim?’
‘Jim Scott.’ She nodded, then slid the sheet back.
‘Scott?’
‘Yes. Why, what?’
‘Nothing.’ I slid the sheet back and folded it. ‘You didn’t say he was an arsehole.’
‘He was … troubled.’
‘Troubled enough to batter us?’
She flinched.
‘Did he?’
‘Look, I don’t—’
I stood up, pulled at the top buttons of my top.
‘What are you – stop it, Ellie,’ Bernadette told me, but I wasn’t going to stop.
I turned my back to her and twisted my top round to show her the scarred skin on my shoulder. ‘Did he do this?’
Horror on her face. ‘Look, sit down, we can—’
I yanked the fabric down again, then faced her and lifted the top to expose my side and the rucked, ruined skin around my flank and onto my abdomen. The conversations around us went silent.
‘This man you’re talking about like he’s some kind of victim here. Did he do this to me, do you think?’
She got up and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Ellie. Please. You need to sit down.’
‘Do I? Is that what I need?’ I was breathing hard, my teeth tight and furious. ‘It’s funny. Because everyone seems to have an opinion on what I should be doing. But I’m starting to get a bit tired of doing what I’m told.’
She didn’t take her eyes from mine, even when the chairs beside us scraped back and the two guys in suits muttered their way over to a different table. ‘You’re angry. I’m not surprised. You’ve been lied to, and the people you thought you could trust haven’t turned out to be that trustworthy. I get it. I do. But I don’t know the answer to your question.’ She gave my shoulders a gentle squeeze and dropped her hands. ‘Can I show you what I brought?’
I sank back into my chair, the fight gone out of me.
Opening the bag, she slid out a brown envelope. ‘To be honest, finding you has been … not what I’d thought. But anyway. Here.’ She carefully upended the envelope and slid out a slim stack of photographs.
‘I took these out of the albums when Mum was in the hospice, before she passed away. She wanted them in her room, in frames so she could see them.’
She placed the first one on the table. It showed a younger Bernadette holding a little blonde girl of maybe two on her lap, both of them grinning at the top of a playground slide. The next was the same girl standing on the driver’s seat of a conve
rtible, gripping the steering wheel, Bernadette beside her, hands around her waist. The next showed the girl again, a little older this time, on the shoulders of an older man. I studied the girl, being the obvious theme, trying to recall her. Was I supposed to know this child? Why?
‘Dad,’ Bernadette said quietly, touching the man’s face.
She put the remaining two next to the others. One was of two women, startlingly similar, their hairstyles both in the exaggeratedly voluminous style of the eighties. Bernadette, and my mum. Sisters in their twenties, a night out.
The colours in the other image were slightly faded and the focus was off, but it was clear enough. It was my mother, her hair permed almost into ringlets, cradling a baby. She was leaning in to a man who could have been the soldier she’d shown me yesterday, though he was in a denim shirt this time. They formed the classic pose of the new family of three. I touched my fingertip to his face, the light smudge of an unshaven lip. The shaggy, ash-coloured hair. Blue eyes.
‘And you’ve never seen any pictures like these before?’
I shook my head. ‘There was a burglary,’ I said vaguely, not taking my eyes from the picture. ‘All our photos.’
‘When?’
‘I was two.’
The backs of his fingers were resting against the child’s face, and he was pulling my mother in with the other hand. Their beatific faces gazing at the tiny, newborn child. Pink, blotchy cheeks as round as peaches; a puff of white-blonde hair.
‘Ellie,’ she said. I lifted my head. ‘There wasn’t a burglary. Not when you were two.’
‘Yes. There was. We lost everything—’ I insisted, but even I could hear the weakness in it.
Infinitely gentle, she said, ‘Are you sure? Have you checked?’
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Didn’t have room for what she was saying. I didn’t have any room for any of it.
Bernadette touched my hand as I turned my attention back to the table. I could feel her eyes on me. ‘This is Christine, you can see that. It’s the day of the birth. This man is … well, you can see. It’s true he and Christine had their problems, and they might well have called it a day even if she hadn’t disappeared but – look. This is him. He’s alive here, and as far as I know, he still is.’