by T. M. Logan
My heart is suddenly in free fall; all the blood draining from my chest. I have to grip the coffee cup tightly to make sure I don’t drop it. Mia is not here. Images flicker in front of my eyes. A curl of white blonde hair. Tiny white fingernails. A little bubble of milk on rosebud lips.
The breath is stuck in my throat.
‘Who’s gone, Angela?’
She closes her eyes on fresh tears that roll down her cheeks unchecked.
‘You must have been one of the last people to see her alive. My little girl. My beautiful Kathryn.’
53
I blink, trying to think of the words. But there are none. Of course there aren’t. I had known the police were trying to find Kathryn but I’d somehow convinced myself that she was lying low, keeping her head down until the danger had passed. Hiding, perhaps, or maybe still running. But not this.
‘I’m so sorry, Angela,’ I say quietly. ‘I didn’t know. The police didn’t tell me.’
She swallows hard, suddenly looking older and frailer than before.
‘Three days we hadn’t heard from her. Three days since . . . she got on that train. You keep on hoping, you know? Even though your mother’s instinct tells you everything is wrong. I had a text from her on Tuesday night saying she wanted some time to herself, she was going to go off to our weekend house in Norfolk for a few days and not to worry if she was out of contact. But I knew it wasn’t right, it didn’t sound like her at all. She was always on her phone. I knew straight away that something terrible had happened. I knew.’
‘Someone else sent that message?’
She nods, finding a fresh tissue in her pocket and wiping her nose and eyes. ‘Whoever did this was trying to cover their tracks, the police think. The post-mortem said she was probably already . . . she had already passed away by then.’
I reach out and cover her hand with mine, her skin papery and cold under my palm.
‘I don’t know what to say, Angela. I’m just so, so sorry for your loss. I only spent a little time with your daughter but she was a lovely young woman. She wanted to protect Mia.’
‘The detective inspector came to tell us last night that they’d found a body in the woods near Seer Green. I had to go in today to do the identification.’ She indicates her husband, still sitting wordlessly in the shadows across the room. ‘We both went, but Gerald couldn’t do the formal bit. I did it.’
I try to make sense of her words, trying to stitch together fragments of a larger canvas. An image returns to me, of Leon Markovitz on the train, looming over me, only moments after Kathryn had got off. She separated herself from Mia because she knew danger was close by. Perhaps she didn’t know who, exactly, but she drew that danger away from the baby all the same. Sacrificed herself. Did Markovitz turn back and go after her again after losing me in the station?
‘I can’t imagine how hard that must have been.’
She pulls the tissue from the sleeve of her cardigan again, wiping her eyes. ‘Do you have children of your own, Ellen?’
‘Always wanted them, but it never quite happened for me and my ex.’
‘I was a late starter, an older mother, nearly forty when I had mine. Always wanted girls. I was lucky, blessed with my two.’ She shakes her head slowly, not seeming to see me. ‘All the things you worry about when they’re little, when they’re growing up, all the hazards and dangers you learn to be aware of, cot death and meningitis rash and choking on food, steep stairs and open windows. Then it’s cars on the street and open water and talking to strangers and a million other things. By the time they’re adults you fool yourself that the worst dangers are over, that you’ve got past it, you’ve succeeded in navigating all those hazards and you can let them get on with it. But really it’s harder than when they were little, because you can’t protect them anymore. You can’t hold them close and shield them like you used to, and the danger’s still out there. It’s just changed.’
A sound cuts the air between us. A little moan, a tiny grunt of a baby turning, shifting in her sleep, and for a second I think I’ve imagined it. Mia. But then Angela stands and walks to a bookcase by the door, turns up the volume on a white plastic baby monitor and listens for a second. The sound fades away and Angela sits back down in her armchair, bringing the monitor with her.
‘Mia?’ I say, a glow in my chest.
She nods, looking at her watch. ‘She’s due a feed soon. She’s a hungry little monkey.’
I wait for a beat to pass before speaking again.
‘Angela, I met someone who said Mia was still in danger,’ I say slowly. ‘But I think he was trying to trick me, to get me to convince you to leave here. To leave this house, take Mia away with you.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Dominic Church. He said . . . Mia would still be at risk as long as she stayed here.’
‘He’s got a bloody nerve after how he treated Zoe.’ Angela’s fists clench in her lap. ‘Still trying to control her life, control Mia’s life, even now. Trying to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. Kicking him out of her life was the best decision she ever made.’
‘How’s Zoe coping, Angela? She’s heard about Kathryn?’
Angela turns her head to look away, the skin tight along her jaw. A ringing reaches us from somewhere else in the house. A landline phone, its noise echoing down the hallway, intrusively loud against the quiet. It trills six times but she makes no move to go and pick it up.
Abruptly the trilling stops and silence is restored, falling like a blanket over the house.
Angela speaks without looking at me. ‘Yes, I’ve told her,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’
It’s a statement rather than a request. She pockets the baby monitor and stands up to lead me out of the lounge, down a long hallway lined with wooden picture frames perfectly spaced, one after the other. Images of Kathryn and Zoe as children together; a proud little girl hugging her baby sister, then kneeling on a sandy beach, at a school sports day, in fancy dress, cheek to cheek in paper Christmas hats, as teenagers with reluctant smiles for the camera, then Zoe in a black graduation gown arm-in-arm with Kathryn wearing her mortar board at a jaunty angle. Angela leads me past a book-lined study and another reception room, wooden floorboards creaking beneath our feet, past a downstairs bathroom and into another corridor.
‘This is the annexe,’ Angela says over her shoulder. ‘It’s just down here.’
At the end of the corridor is a single closed door, plain white, a viewing window set into it. She opens the door and I follow her into a large white room, sash windows looking out on the lawn on two sides. The sharp smell of antiseptic in the air. The room is dominated by a high single bed, metal-framed and complicated as if it’s come from a hospital ward, machines and monitors beeping and clicking beside it. Two monitors, one on top of the other, numbered displays in green and red.
In the bed, there is a young woman. Dark hair fanned out on the pillow behind her, her skin so pale it is almost translucent. There is a tube running into the back of her hand and a sensor clipped to the end of her thumb trailing a wire out of sight. A slow and steady beep beep from a screen next to the bed.
Her eyes are closed.
‘This is my eldest, Zoe.’ Angela goes to the bed and touches the back of a hand gently against her daughter’s cheek. ‘We had this annexe converted when we brought her home from hospital so she could be with us, after it happened. She’s much happier here at home. I won’t leave her, and I won’t leave Mia either. So we won’t run away, no matter how Dominic Church might try to frighten us away. We stay here. All of us, together.’
A woman in a starched blue nurse’s uniform appears from a side room. She’s fortyish and has a kind face, her dark hair pinned carefully back. Angela gives her a nod.
‘Why don’t you get yourself home now, Michelle? See you on Monday morning.’
‘Thanks, Mrs Clifton.’ The nurse peels off latex gloves and drops them in a yellow bin in the corner marked Medical waste – fo
r incineration. She gives Angela a soft smile. ‘If you need me to come in tomorrow though, just let me know. It’s no bother.’
Michelle takes her coat from the back of the door and leaves the way we came in, her footsteps clicking into the silence.
‘She’s very good,’ Angela says when the room is quiet again. ‘Very experienced. She spent a lot of time getting Zoe settled, those early months. Making sure she was comfortable, getting her routines going. In fact, Michelle was the one who first realised.’
I move closer to Zoe until I’m standing by her bed, her palm laid flat on the crisp white bedsheet just inches from mine. The beeping of her heart monitor is the only sound in the room, steady and hypnotic, each pulse a gossamer thread keeping her tethered to life. I’m still here. I’m still here.
‘Realised what?’ I say, looking up at her mother.
‘That Zoe was pregnant.’
54
Angela tells me the whole story. A moonless night in September, just over a year ago, Zoe finishing an evening shift of outreach work with vulnerable women on the streets of north London. Walking home alone when she was grabbed, beaten, knocked unconscious, her balaclava-wearing attacker intent on strangling her until he was disturbed in the act, chased away by a group of students returning from a night out. One of the students was a first-year medic who gave Zoe mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until the ambulance arrived.
‘Her heart stopped twice on the way to the hospital,’ Angela says. She is sitting in a chair by the bed, holding Zoe’s hand, her thumb tracing the line of a pale blue vein on the back of her daughter’s hand. ‘But they managed to bring her back both times. Those first twenty-four hours were unbearable, the worst. Thinking every minute that we were going to lose her; then trying to keep her alive in the first few days, bouncing between that and the hope that she might actually regain consciousness. But her brain had been starved of oxygen for too long – there was too much damage.’
I put a hand to my mouth, the weight of tears heavy behind my eyes.
‘I’m so sorry, Angela.’ The words feel hopelessly inadequate. ‘For both of you. I can’t imagine . . .’
‘The media had a version of the story by then,’ Angela continues, ‘saying it was this serial attacker the police couldn’t catch, this ‘Ghost’ who was still on the loose, filling in the gaps in the story they didn’t know by suggesting that Zoe was a sex worker like the other victims. That subtext of just another prostitute, as if that meant they all deserved it in some way. Every headline as if she was being attacked all over again. And we couldn’t help her, no matter what we tried.’ She pauses, takes a deep breath. ‘You feel so helpless, as if you can’t do what a mother is supposed to do. But after a couple of months, after this room had been kitted out, we brought her back from the hospital so she could be with us, at home. We thought it might help her recovery.’
I look at her daughter’s pale skin, long lashes beneath closed eyes, the slow pulse of a vein at her neck, wondering whether there might be any kind of recovery for her. Whether she might ever hold her own daughter in her arms, feed her, smile at her, wonder at the miracle of life that she had made. If there was anything that could bring her back from this existence, suspended somewhere between life and death, or whether the Ghost had taken it all away from her forever.
Angela says, ‘She always looked for the good in people, always believed the best in them.’
‘How far along was she,’ I say quietly, ‘when you realised she was pregnant?’
‘About twelve weeks.’
‘And it wasn’t . . . from when she was attacked?’
Angela shakes her head. ‘The police did their tests, didn’t find anything.’ Without looking at me, she adds, ‘And no, we never thought about abortion. We never even discussed it. When you see life hanging by a thread, you want to cling to it, nurture it. Gerald was convinced she would miscarry anyway, but Mia had other ideas.’
She describes the move to a private wing of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington at thirty-seven weeks for a planned caesarean section, a healthy baby delivered and both mother and daughter returning to the big house in Prestwood Ash a month later. A guest room converted into a nursery, grandparents taking on the role of parents.
‘I didn’t even know she’d been seeing anyone after her and Dominic split up; she was quite secretive about things like that. Kathryn knew something was going on but the only thing she could get out of Zoe was that it was early days, and she couldn’t talk about him yet. That it was . . . complicated.’ She brushes a strand of hair off her daughter’s forehead. ‘And then all of a sudden, the relationship was over. He was history. She was so upset, but she still wouldn’t talk about it apart from to say he wasn’t a good person and she wished she’d never met him. I told her she should come over and spend the weekend at home with us. But that night she was attacked.’
‘And the police never tracked down her boyfriend?’
‘They investigated, they pulled her private life apart, but they never came up with a name and whoever he was, this boyfriend never came forward. Never volunteered himself.’
‘Do you think it’s because he’s the one who tried to kill her?’
Angela nodded. ‘Just like he killed those other two women. And now he’s taken Kathryn from us too.’
‘You think it’s the same man?’
‘He knew her. He knows us.’
Dominic. His name reverberates in my head, crowding out everything else. A man who had been at the heart of this family, who knew them all.
‘The message he sent from Kathryn’s mobile,’ I say, ‘about your holiday home?’
Angela nods. ‘How else would he know something like that, except from Zoe?’
‘Did the police . . .’ I can’t think of a sensitive way to put it. ‘Are they going to take a sample of DNA from Mia? See if they can track him down that way?’
She nods slowly. ‘They did it once already but there was some sort of problem with it. They’re going to take another sample on Monday.’
A high-pitched sigh cuts through the silence and Angela takes the little baby monitor from her pocket, the display popping with green lights as it transmits the tiny voice to us from somewhere else in the house.
‘She’s awake,’ Angela says, with the ghost of a smile. ‘Would you like to see her?’
‘Yes, I’d like that.’ My heart swells in my chest at the thought of seeing Mia again, a sunburst of warmth right at my core. ‘I’d like it very much.’
She gives Zoe’s monitors one more check and kisses her gently on the temple, then leads me back out to the entrance hall. I follow her up the grand curving staircase, each step wide and shallow as it sweeps up to a first floor landing lit by a chandelier. The staircase continues upwards to a second floor, another landing, past bedrooms and bathrooms, a library and a home gym, the little voice on the monitor burbling and chattering all the way. At the end of the landing, Angela opens a door and beckons me through. The nursery is at least five times the size of the little box bedroom at my house, with every conceivable gadget, toy and labour-saving device for new parents. It’s tastefully decorated in yellow and pale blue, one wallpapered wall busy with images of colourful tropical birds. Angela pulls up half-closed blackout blinds on two tall windows, bathing the whole room in afternoon light.
‘It’s a little bit different to when I was growing up with my brothers and sisters in Toxteth,’ she says, leaning down into a cot in the corner. ‘Back then it was five to a room, two in each bed and the littlest in the bottom drawer.’
She lifts the baby up onto her shoulder, supporting her head and whispering into her ear. Tiny hands clutch the folds of her grandma’s cardigan. A soft white sleepsuit, tufts of blonde hair standing up off her head as she gurgles happily. Angela walks over to me and turns around so I can see her face, this little miracle baby.
Mia.
55
‘This little one is the only thing that’s keeping us going,’ Angela says,
jiggling Mia gently on her shoulder. ‘Such a happy baby, just like her mum was.’
Mia gives me a gummy grin, her chuckle lighting up the room, and at the sound of it I feel my heart lift. Angela sees me and her expression softens.
‘Would you like to hold her for a minute, while I get her feed ready?’
I nod. Angela smiles and hands Mia over to me, settling her gently so she nestles in the crook of my elbow. I rock her slowly from side to side, that perfect weight in my arm, soft and warm and beautiful. Mia looks up at me with her big blue eyes, smiling and giggling, a little hand reaching up to my face, tiny fingertips brushing my cheeks. A little bundle of life, pure and untainted, untouched, this one good thing that has survived in the midst of so much tragedy and grief.
Angela takes a clean baby bottle from the cupboard and puts it into a Perfect Prep machine next to the changing table. She presses buttons on the machine’s display and it whirs into life, preparing a formula feed for Mia.
‘Sometimes I just come in here and sit with her and cry,’ Angela says. ‘She’s all I have left of my girls, now. Of either of them. I look at Mia and I see my daughters. It doesn’t matter how she came to us, the circumstances.’ The machine beeps and she takes out the bottle, screws the lid on, shakes it and squirts a little milk onto her wrist. ‘I wasn’t sure, before she was born, whether I’d even be able to look at her. But as soon as I saw her, as soon as I held her, it was love. I knew, right from that first minute.’
The emotion comes out of nowhere, rising higher and higher, a tidal wave, a tsunami that I’m powerless to stop. And just like that I’m crying, tears rolling down my cheeks.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry, Angela, it’s just, she’s so, so beautiful. And with what happened to Zoe. It’s all so sad.’
I’m smiling through my tears, and Mia is smiling back at me.
‘She likes you,’ Angela says. ‘I think she remembers you.’