The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  I shrug. ‘I spent a night hanging around with a dead body. It’s enough to upset anyone.’

  ‘I don’t disagree. How about you tell us your name?’

  ‘How about no?’

  He draws a deep breath. ‘We’ll find it out, anyway. It would be easier for you if you just told us.’

  I look up at him. ‘Hope,’ I say. ‘My name is Hope. But you can call me Hopeless, if you prefer. It suits me better.’

  ‘And the girl?’

  With no warning, my memory opens up and I see the two of us standing together the day we first met, her black skirt sweeping the floor, her blue eyes locked on mine, the touch of her hand on my arm…

  I feel my heart clench and kick out.

  ‘Get away from me!’ I’m shouting suddenly, grabbing hold of a chair and hurling it across the room. I don’t care where it lands. I’m not aiming it at anyone. ‘Just fuck off.’ I pick up the next chair and throw it, then reach for the table with its cold cups of tea.

  ‘That’s enough, Hope!’

  And then there are big arms around me, holding me tight so I can’t move, and a voice trained to be firm and soothing says, ‘You’re safe, Hope. You need to calm down.’

  ‘Get off me,’ I say.

  ‘We’ll let you go when you’re calm.’

  I can’t move. I keep shouting. The police go on holding me.

  5

  She must be feeling awful, down there at the police station. I suppose that’s why she’s giving them such merry hell. But still, I can’t help being amused by her, for all my anger.

  We were meant to be getting married in that church, near where I died. I liked it there –small and dark and right on the lakeshore. We’d been planning it for months.

  ‘I want a black wedding,’ I said, ‘with bats and black roses and no guests.’

  ‘Alright.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ she said, and that was it. We had no rings, but we were engaged. We were engaged until she betrayed me.

  The police are on their way to Hillfoot now. Lara’s watching them from her bedroom window, walking gravely up the track to the front door, ready to give the serious knock that signals bad news. She’s going to hide, of course, because that’s what she always does. I read her file once – I wasn’t supposed to – and I know she’s been getting worse over the last year or so. She hasn’t always been this bad. It used to be that she fell silent for a while at the beginning of each new foster placement, just until she felt more settled, and then she’d slowly open up again, if people were patient enough with her. The speech therapists called it selective mutism at first because she would talk to some people, just not everyone; but recently she’s been slipping further and further away, out of anyone’s reach.

  She’s like a shy, hunted animal. For hours, she’ll sit hunched over in her spot by the fireplace, and now and then, the staff will try and lure her out with gentle words and promises of safety. She never responds and they end up walking away in despair, fearful that she’ll stay there forever; but then later they’ll look up and her space will be empty and she’ll be gone, and no one will ever have seen her leave.

  It’s a trick she’s a master of – making herself invisible. It didn’t work with Ace, though. He noticed her.

  Ace. I still feel giddy at the thought of him. The wild love and the ferocious hate. I hope they catch him one day and he rots in jail. We all hope that. Apart from my mother, of course.

  Lara’s room is at the front of the house and has a long view of the mountains, all the way over to the Langdale Pikes, their jagged grey summits held in this winter’s hard, white freeze. The sight of them in the distance like that frightens her. Sometimes, she sits at her window with her hands over her eyes and looks at them through the gaps in her fingers. To her, they’re monstrous – vast, rocky bulks slabbed against the sky, and when darkness falls they’re even worse because then they seem to start moving. The night-time lurch of the mountains, ready to smother the life out of her.

  Her room is right above the office, where only staff are allowed. It holds our records in a big filing cabinet, all the paperwork documenting our whole, messy histories: social workers’ reports, hospital notes, court reports, psychiatric reports … Entry by us is strictly off limits, the door heavily protected by two locks to which only Helen and Danny have the keys. Still, even that didn’t prevent me from breaking in one night. I couldn’t help myself, although I do know that’s not much of an excuse. But when something is forbidden, it’s hard to resist. Danny left his keys lying around one day, so I pocketed them and let myself in when everyone else was asleep. I found everything. All of Lara’s life was there, spread out for me to see. It was mind-bogglingly bad. I wanted to help her after that – become her friend, or her surrogate mother – but she wasn’t having it.

  The office is also the place for meetings and secret, unknowable discussions among the staff. The trouble is, when the care company who owned this home bought it, they didn’t realise there was no soundproofing in the floors. Every word spoken on one floor is carried through the timbers to the next. I sometimes reckoned they’d done it deliberately, so they could listen to everything we said in case we were plotting murder or escape.

  Two hours have passed now since they found our beds empty, two hours in which all the staff have been shut in the office, making phone calls and talking in low voices. Strictly speaking, someone is meant to be available for Lara all the time but they mostly don’t bother. She’s no trouble and really, there’s nothing anyone can do with her. Occasionally, someone might say, ‘Lara, do you fancy a walk down to the tarn?’ or, ‘Lara, shall we drive into Windermere for an ice cream?’ But she’ll just fix them with her vacant, brown-eyed stare, or look away from them. No one understands that she can’t leave her tiny, silent world. She’s locked herself in and stepping outside is dangerous.

  She’s always on the lookout, though, always alert. She needs to know what’s going on around her, and when to hide. She keeps a glass in her drawer, wrapped up in an old jumper, and when the low voices start downstairs, she takes it out and holds it to the floor, her ear pressed softly against it so the words can drift up to her like smoke.

  This morning, she heard Danny make the first phone call to the police. ‘I’d like to report two missing fifteen-year-old girls,’ he said. Then he told the person on the other end of the line that he believed we’d run away overnight, but we were vulnerable young people and there could be threatening adults out there, waiting for us…

  Mad mothers and pimps.

  He gave our names and brief descriptions and when he came off the phone he said to the others, ‘An officer will be round within the next hour.’

  It’s just after midday now, and here comes the knock. Lara listens as the door creaks open and a strong, male voice says, ‘I’m PC Graham French and this is my colleague, WPC Muzna Rahman.’

  She hears the sound of boots against the tiled floor and the door close behind them. They lower their voices to the ground. Through the glass, Lara listens.

  ‘We found two girls matching your description this morning. One is with us at the station. She says her name is Hope. I am very sorry to have to tell you that the other girl is dead.’

  There is a stunned silence.

  Then Clare says, ‘But it’s Christmas Day,’ as if somehow Christmas ought to make death impossible.

  ‘I know this is a terrible shock. It’s a terrible shock for Hope, too, as you can imagine. She’s finding it very difficult to talk to us. She hasn’t yet told us the other girl’s name, and we need an appropriate adult to be with her in the interview room to support her. Her friend – if that’s what she was to Hope – was dead at the scene. The paramedics took her to hospital. You can expect a call sometime today from the mortuary staff. They’ll be needing someone to formally identify the body.’

  Danny clears his throat. ‘I’ll be able to do that,’ he says. He’s the only bloke here, so he pretends to
be tougher than he is.

  Gillian says, ‘How did she die?’

  ‘We can’t be certain at this stage, but the circumstances surrounding the death look suspicious. The state of the body suggests drowning, and we did find her on the lake shore; but there are other injuries that lead us to believe this could be a murder case. Hope isn’t telling us very much, but she is our key witness. Assuming that they left here together, we think she was there throughout the whole process, and that she didn’t leave her friend’s side.’

  Silence again.

  Lara takes her ear away from the glass and wills them to stop talking. I know she’s no stranger to murder. She’s full of it. If a butcher reached into her guts, he’d pull out long strings of a buried, murderous past. He’d find it in every organ, every drop of her blood. She feels like she’s going to overflow now, spill murder on the floor for everyone to drown in.

  I watch as she takes herself to her wardrobe, climbs inside and sits there, letting the hanging clothes brush against her face, lovingly, like fingers.

  Like all of us, she is longing for her mother.

  6

  Helen

  All year, Helen had been saving for this. It was a perk of being the manager. She no longer had to pack the kids off to her ex-husband while she spent Christmas Day at work, trying to keep angry teenagers from running away, from tearing their rooms apart, from suicide. Now, she could spend it with her own two children, lavishing them with gifts and good things to eat, proving to them – because they always complained about it – that they really were more important than her job.

  Except they wouldn’t bloody get up. Their first Christmas together for ten years and they were still lolling about in bed, glued to their devices, barely glancing at the stockings she’d so carefully filled for them. It was something she’d always done; even when they’d gone to their dad’s, she’d smuggle them, fully stuffed, into the boot of her car and then discreetly hand them over to him before she left, just about trusting him to leave them by their beds on Christmas Eve. ‘Oh, it’s just the same stuff every year,’ Chloe said, when Helen couldn’t wait any longer and went into her room. ‘A pair of gloves, some hand cream, a few pens and some notebooks. I’ll look at it later, when I’m properly awake.’ And then she returned to Snapchat.

  Jack was even worse. He was playing a game of some kind and Helen wasn’t sure if he’d even been to sleep yet. Possibly, he was still lost in whatever zombie apocalypse he’d started when he came home last night. Or possibly, she no longer even had a son. It often felt to her as though he’d been kidnapped by the strange creatures in his iPad. He was almost unable to function off-screen – whenever he re-emerged, bleary-eyed and cognitively absent, he was forever desperate to get back to it.

  She made herself a coffee and thought about phoning her parents. But could she face it? Her dad, she’d realised when she saw them last weekend, was on his way out and her mother refused to acknowledge it. ‘Oh, he’s always been like that,’ she said, when Helen tried to talk to her about the fact that he’d climbed into the back seat of the car and spent five minutes looking for the steering wheel. He’d always been prone to mixing up his words – never could grasp the difference between Brie and Stilton, or sometimes even the train station and the marina – but he’d never been as absent as he was last week. Helen saw the future waiting for them like an open mouth: her dad lurching towards dementia; her mother unable to cope; and her, the only child, balancing teenage children and a full-time job with supporting the two of them 300 miles away.

  A new year was dawning, and that was the only change she could see. Otherwise, it would just be more of the same: the demands of her work; the evenings spent exhausted on the sofa with a six-pack of KitKats and Netflix, and the ever-expanding space in the house that used to be filled with children who needed her.

  She tried not to think about it. New Year was harder than Christmas in some ways – full of everyone’s remembrances and hopes for the future. It was enough to make her dizzy.

  The sudden, shrill ring of the telephone interrupted her thoughts. She picked it up, expecting the joyful, festive tones of her mother or ex-husband, phoning for the children.

  ‘Hello, Helen.’ The voice was familiar but so sombre and grave, she couldn’t place it. All she knew was that it carried bad news.

  ‘It’s Gillian,’ the voice continued.

  Work. They were phoning her at home on Christmas Day. This could only mean something awful.

  She tightened her grip on the phone. ‘What’s happened?’

  She could tell from the way Gillian spoke that this wasn’t the usual case of a young person self-harming or running away and ending up in police custody. It was more than that. She started tunnelling through all the recent dramas with the three girls they cared for, hunting for clues. Hope had been caught shoplifting and cautioned for shouting at a police officer; Annie had thrown a chair into her bedroom door and broken it; Lara was silent, as usual, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to worry about.

  There was a moment’s pause. Then, ‘Annie has passed away. A man found the body in the churchyard on the edge of Meddleswater early this morning. The police have said it’s suspicious. We’ve just had a call from the mortuary, and Danny’s about to leave to formally identify the body, but there seems to be little doubt. Hope was with her. She’s at the station now. I’m so sorry to have to tell you this, Helen.’

  Helen couldn’t speak.

  Gillian said, ‘Everyone’s in shock here. I think we need—’

  ‘I’ll be over as soon as I can. Oh, God. I’m meant to be putting a turkey in the oven and the kids aren’t up…’ She heard her words and shook herself suddenly. ‘Sorry, Gillian. What a stupid thing to say.’

  ‘Don’t worry.’

  ‘I’ll be there soon.’

  They said goodbye and she hung up. There was a chill in her stomach and a rawness to her chest, as though someone had sliced a chunk out of her flesh and left it to gape. Annie was dead. Murdered. It struck Helen, guiltily, that she’d have been less shocked if it were Hope who’d been killed. An abrupt and brutal ending to her life seemed … not fitting, of course, she’d never say that, but somehow inevitable. But Annie? The one girl Helen had thought might be able to break out of this misery because she should never really have been in care in the first place, and because she was bright and also quite lovely if you gave her a chance. They were all quite lovely, if you gave them a chance.

  She couldn’t help herself. As she went upstairs to break the news to Jack and Chloe that they wouldn’t be having Christmas together after all, she started racking her brain, wondering if the CQC would launch an investigation into standards of care at a home that allowed a vulnerable young girl to wander away at night and be murdered.

  Neglect. They could do her for neglect. Annie and Hope were always running off together, disappearing into the fells for hours, coming back to the home wild-eyed, bedraggled and high as kites. She should have put a stop to it. She should have paid waking-night staff to sit downstairs every evening and make sure no one got out. The trouble was, she’d already done that. It cost £75 a night and she was meant to be running this home on a shoestring. The cuts to funding were becoming more frequent and more severe, and the place was being shut down in March. Extra staff were an extravagance they could no longer afford.

  But now Annie was dead and someone would have to be blamed. Dear God, she wasn’t paid enough for this.

  7

  They’re both looking at me, proper tough. ‘For the last time, Hope. What was the name of the girl you were with this morning?’

  ‘Annie,’ I say. ‘Annie the Tranny.’

  The one who’d spoken raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Alright, not tranny,’ I tell him. ‘Lezzer. Annie the Lezzer. Doesn’t sound as good, though, does it?’

  The police officers glance at each other and say something with a few nods and gestures. It’s a code I’m not meant to understand, but I do. I�
��m not a bit surprised when the bloke says, ‘OK, that’s enough, Hope. We’re going to arrest you now on suspicion of murder…’

  One of them puts his hands on my shoulders, firmly so I can’t move away. The other one bolts handcuffs round my wrists. I think about kicking off, then change my mind. I could do with a break somewhere peaceful, like a prison cell.

  ‘Where are you taking me?’

  ‘To the custody suite. We’ll be formally interviewing you later. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if…’

  Blah, fucking blah.

  I hear her voice again as they lead me down a cold corridor lined with heavily bolted doors. Bastards, she’s whispering, so clearly I spin my head round to see if she’s beside me. She’s not.

  So they’ve left me alone, banged up in a cell as if I’m the one who killed her. It’s pretty much what I imagined a cell would be like – about six feet square with a concrete block taking up half the space. It’s meant to be a bed but there are no covers, just a blue plastic mat like the ones they make you do headstands on at school. There’s also a low metal toilet, but it’s filthy with the piss of criminals, and I’d rather just shit my pants, thank you very much.

  This is what happens in a police station when they get fed up with your smart-alec answers. They take it as evidence of your guilt. They said they’d haul me back in when I’m ready to co-operate. That’ll be never.

  ‘Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies,’ I said. I saw someone on TV saying that once. It really pissed them off. I like playing around with people’s heads. I learned it from her. I learned pretty much everything I know from her, including how to swear and how to lie.

  ‘You’ll never survive if you don’t toughen up,’ she told me. ‘The world’ll eat you alive.’

  She was right. The world is eating me alive. I’m nothing more than a bright-red wound and my words keep coming out covered in blood.