It’s easier being alone. Easier to feel like she’s here, I mean. In the silence, I lie back and feel her all around me. Invisible, but present. It was always like this if she ever went away. I’d lie in bed on my own, and even though there was no body to reach for, it still felt as though she was by my side. I suppose that’s what love is. Maybe that’s what ghosts are – the love that won’t stop, even though they’re gone, so strong it’s as physical as life.
If I close my eyes, I can see her now. She’s standing beside me, dressed all in black, forever half in love with death. She takes her tarot deck from the bag slung over her shoulder – she carried those cards everywhere with her; said she wasn’t setting foot even one moment in the future unless she knew what it held. She pulls out a card. The two of cups. I know what that means, of course. It’s us as we were before it all went bad between us, nothing but love and passion and joy. Then she pulls out another one and waves it in front of my face.
The tower, she says. The worst one. All that’s good is collapsing.
There’s anger in her voice and I open my eyes with a start. I want the room to be filled with her again, but something has shifted. She’s gone, and not even love is enough to conjure her back.
8
I’ve never seen her like this. Of the two of us, she was always the softer one, the better behaved, the most polite. It was me who dragged her down, with my murky biography and crazy, angry ways. We were an unlikely love match, that was true – opposite in so many ways – but where it mattered we were the same. She understood me, and there is nothing more erotic than being understood, especially when the rest of the world finds you impossible.
I suppose she’s in shock. It does strange things to people. She needs to stop lying, though. She’s getting herself into trouble and she’s already messed everything up. The investigation needs to get back on track. I don’t mind being sacrificed, but something good has to come of it now, and that’s all in her hands.
I don’t feel bad for her, not really. I feel bad for Lara. She doesn’t need all this. She’s already mad enough. I’d wanted to do her a favour. I’d wanted to protect her. Now, I think I’ve made everything worse.
I want to say. It will all be OK, Lara.
But it won’t be OK. Anyone can tell that. Lara’s as dead as I am. There’s not a chance here of a happy ending.
She still isn’t speaking. This morning’s news has changed something in her, though, and she at least wants to be in a room with others now. The staff look pretty disappointed about it. They’d wanted to spend these first minutes after the police left drinking tea together and sharing their shock and grief, but of course they can’t discuss it around Lara, not unless Lara speaks first, which everyone knows she isn’t going to do.
The fact that Lara is no stranger to murder doesn’t make this one any easier to deal with. She never used to speak to either of us, but our rooms are close to each other and the walls are thin, so she’d overhear all the private details of our lives: the agitated pacing of floorboards at night; the murmured phone calls; the unexpected, gentle weeping. Now, there’s only silence. Lara has never known silence in houses before. She’s only known the dangerous uproar of fierce adult misery, and simply exists in her own time and space, far away from the noise and terror of others.
The staff keep on talking to her, though. She hears their voices as a drone in the air around her. ‘Would you like a drink, Lara?’ they’ll ask now and then and sometimes, they’ll even touch on the subject of Annie. ‘What happened to Annie was terrible,’ Clare says. ‘But you mustn’t be frightened, because the police will catch whoever did it.’
You mustn’t be frightened. All her life, people have said that to Lara, as though any fear is her own fault, as though it’s really just a silly thing to be afraid of all this – these people and the things they do to each other, all around her, all the time, the awful things she can’t stop.
You mustn’t be frightened. She stands up from her seat and backs slowly out of the kitchen, away from these women and their feeble language. There is no sense in speech. All words are useless.
9
Helen
No one should have to do this without a 4x4, but no one who worked in a children’s home could afford one, and Helen’s Fiat Panda just wasn’t up to it. The track from the main road was long, rocky and potholed and could wreck a car in an instant. It was worst on winter evenings. A couple of weeks ago, she’d missed sight of a rock in the darkness and ended up with a flat tyre, a broken exhaust and cracked bumper.
It ought to have been as hard for the girls to escape this place as it was for anyone else to get to it. They should have been afraid to step into this landscape alone, to face the endless hulks of the mountains, the impenetrable mists, the ice and the violent winds.
Annie, she was certain, would never have done it without Hope, but Hope was afraid of nothing. All she really wanted, everyone knew, was to throw herself away. She was always on the lookout for how to do it. There was a recklessness to her, an I-don’t-care-if-it-kills-me-I’m-going-to-do-it-anyway-and-don’t-pretend-you-care-enough-to-stop-me attitude it was impossible to strip her of. She’d have walked a tightrope over a motorway, just for the sheer, bloody risk of it. It was something that impressed Annie – that deep vulnerability dressed up as cockiness – and Annie had followed her like a lone, obsessive fan.
And now she was dead.
Helen parked off track, a few minutes’ walk from the house. The morning was cold. The earth beneath her feet had been hardened by winter and there was no sign yet of the movement of life below. She shivered as she reached a bend in the path that wound over the fells to Tilberthwaite. The house itself stood before her, unseen by any except the most steadfast hikers. Those who did see it were charmed by it – the deep, rural remoteness; its aged crookedness; the view over the water to the rugged fells beyond. Their hearts lurched with envy at the thought of real lives being lived out in this place. They had no idea, Helen thought, no idea at all.
Four thousand pounds a week it cost to house a child here, in this particular home, and it was rare any of them lasted for long. They came and went like storms, dumping their catastrophes and moving on. Catastrophe followed these children, or perhaps it was truer to say catastrophe was a part of them. It was their foundation; their brains were wired for it. They could no more avoid it than other children could avoid love.
Helen’s aims had changed over the sixteen years she’d been doing this job. She used to think she could be like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, showing up to work with sullen, violent teenagers and saving them from gang warfare simply by introducing them to the right poetry. She laughed now at how naïve she’d been back then, but of course you had to start out like that. You had to start out with the thought that you could make a difference to someone, or you’d never get out of bed. Now, though, she considered a placement successful if it lasted longer than six months and if the child left for some reason other than that they’d punched someone’s lights out or were about to be shut away in a young offenders’ institution.
The front door was unlocked. She walked in and immediately she could feel it: the brutal tension in the atmosphere; the build-up; the appalling sense that something else awful was about to happen. They’d need to work with Lara straight away, get her therapist in (on Christmas Day?), stop the shock and fear from escalating to crisis.
Clare and Gillian were in the kitchen, grey-faced and silent as they sat round the table. Their faces broke with relief as she entered, as though each of them were visibly handing over a burden. But Helen had no idea what to do with this. She’d never been trained in how to manage staff when a child in their care had been killed, never even dreamed such a thing would happen here, to her. This was the distant drama of television, of newspapers, social media. It wasn’t meant to be lived.
She took off her coat and draped it over the back of a chair. ‘I’m so sorry for what you’re going through,’ she said. Th
at was the way to deal with this for now. Kindness and support, not judgement, although of course she’d have to get to the bottom of it. Annie hadn’t been murdered in her bed. She’d obviously gone out at night when she wasn’t meant to leave the house unsupervised. The media would be all over this, dragging the home – and Helen, especially Helen – through the mud for failing to look after her.
She said, ‘Where’s Lara?’
It was Gillian who answered. ‘She was down here a while ago. She’s gone back to her room.’
Helen nodded. ‘I’ll go and talk to her in a minute. Let me get you both some tea, and then I’ll need you to tell me what happened. Has Danny gone?’
‘He left about ten minutes ago.’
‘He should have waited. I feel like it ought to be my job, to identify the body.’
Clare smiled weakly. ‘You know how macho he likes to be.’
Helen went over to the worktop and flicked the kettle on. It was big, this kitchen, much bigger than the one she had at home. There was a range cooker, oak units, granite worktops, a table that could seat eight, an island where people could play card games or drink tea and chat. The message to these young people was meant to say, We believe you are worth this. Comfortable, homely surroundings and staff who cared – these were the foundations for healing and ambition. No one could move forwards with their lives if they were given only the starkest and cheapest the world had to offer.
Helen filled a teapot, carried it to the table and sat down. ‘So,’ she said. ‘I know everyone is in shock. I am, too.’
Gillian started crying.
Helen went on, ‘And I know you are all desperate to get home. I know this. But if we can, we need to work together for the sake of Lara – and Hope when they release her, which presumably they will do at some point. I’ve thought this through and I can’t ask temporary staff to come in now and take over, not when we’re dealing with trauma. The girls need familiar faces. So I am asking each of you to please stay for the rest of your shift. It’s a big ask, I know it is, and if you can’t manage, I will step in and stay tonight…’
Gillian said, ‘We have to stay, anyway. The police have said they’ll be back later to speak to us.’
Of course. Helen wasn’t sure why she hadn’t thought of that. She nodded slowly. ‘Thank you.’ Then she added, ‘I won’t pretend I’ve ever dealt with anything like this before.’
They looked at her sympathetically.
She sighed heavily. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
Gillian was still crying, so Clare started: ‘It was just gone eleven this morning. The girls hadn’t surfaced from their rooms, so we decided to wake them. We both knocked several times on Hope and Annie’s doors, but their rooms were empty. We tried Lara. She was there. She was fine. But Hope and Annie were nowhere to be seen. Hope’s window was open and the latch was dangling, as if maybe they’d left that way.’
It was possible, Helen thought. The house was built on the slope of a hill and even the upstairs rooms weren’t far from the ground.
Clare went on: ‘Danny called the police. They took the details and a while later, two officers came round to say two girls had been found this morning in Meddleswater churchyard. One was dead. The other one was sitting next to her, howling and sobbing like a madwoman. Well, they didn’t say madwoman exactly, but…’
‘It’s OK. I know.’
Hope. It would have been Hope crying like that. Her friend dead and all those awful, bitter memories of her sister resurfacing. It would send anyone mad. Fleetingly, Helen wondered how Hope was going to survive this. Surely there were limits to what a person could endure before life just went and destroyed them. But then, that was what Hope always said, with a shrug and a smile, as if it didn’t really matter: ‘I’m already dead on the inside. My soul is long gone. It’s in hell by now.’
Helen pushed the thought away. There would be time enough to deal with Hope later. She turned her attention back to the present. ‘I want you to know,’ she said, ‘that I am not trying to apportion any blame here. Not at all. The only person responsible for this is the person who killed Annie. But I do need to know one thing: was Annie in bed when you shut the house down last night?’
Claire and Gillian exchanged furtive glances. Neither of them looked at Helen.
Clare said, ‘We didn’t do a check. It was late. The girls were all quiet. We assumed they’d gone to bed. There had been some arguing earlier. You know how they all hate Christmas. But things were calm, and we didn’t want to rock the boat by disturbing them.’
Helen nodded. ‘OK.’ She wanted to bang their heads together for being so stupid, for being so bloody lazy. She knew that was the real reason no one had bothered checking. It was late and they wanted to go to bed. Perfectly understandable, of course, but children were harmed when their carers were lazy. She’d said it to staff so many times over the years.
‘We’ll have to be honest with the police,’ she said, ‘and tell them that. I don’t suppose it will make any difference. You should have checked, you know that, and the alarm could have been raised sooner, but you’re not the ones who’ve committed the crime here. Did the police say when they’d be back?’
‘Just later today.’
‘I suppose they’ll be wanting Annie’s files. I know they’re all in order, but I’m going to check. Oh, God…’
Just for a moment, she lost her professional grip and sat with her head in her hands. No one came near her. She was meant to be in charge of this. The others were paid £13,000 a year. They needed her to take this burden away from them.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Sorry. Obviously, we’ll have to keep a careful eye on Lara, but today you also need to take it easy. You have my permission to do whatever you need to get through it. Be discreet about it, but phone your families whenever you need to. Don’t do too much. If you really can’t cope, come and talk to me and we’ll see what we can do. Has anyone phoned higher management?’
They all shook their heads. That would be her first job, then.
She headed to her office at the front of the house, unlocked the safe and brought out Annie’s files: two bulging folders full of paperwork, an entire life reduced to nothing but notes from social workers and police officers. That was it. No education, no achievements to celebrate, no records of happy holidays, nothing at all that formed the stuff of most childhoods.
She remembered a line from a police drama she’d watched on Netflix a few weeks ago: ‘Find out how the victim lived and you’ll find out how they died.’ The police were going to want all of this, she knew, because, most likely, somewhere in these files was the name of the person who’d done this.
10
It was a man who found us. He wasn’t local, but most people round here weren’t. In his statement, he said he’d come to the Lake District for Christmas with his new wife and grown-up children. It was the first Christmas he’d spent with his kids for years and he was happy, he said – the sort of happiness only a parent who’d never seen enough of his children could understand. I laughed at that as I spied on them. My mother had never seen enough of her children, but I’m not convinced she’d have described herself as happy to see me. Not after I turned her in to the police.
They stayed up drinking. He’d gone to bed just after midnight and then woken too early, with a hungover wakefulness and a need for air, so he took the family dog and headed down to the lakeshore in the grey half-light of Christmas morning. It was quiet there, he said. The only people around were dog-walking holidaymakers like him. One or two of them wore Santa hats to mark the jollity of the day. Everyone smiled at each other as they passed and said ‘Merry Christmas’ to all these strangers bound by their desire to spend the festive period here, in this far-flung corner of England, where there was nothing to do but launch themselves into the hills and be shrouded in the peace of wild things.
He said he’d seen no one sinister lurking in any shadows.
On the shore of the lake stood a tiny chu
rch, the smallest church he’d ever seen. He had a dim knowledge from somewhere that this was where some poet or other was buried. Not Wordsworth, someone from around that time but less known. His urge to visit the grave was limited, but he knew the graveyard provided a short cut that took him back to the cottage on the other side of the village.
It was half past eight and he was in a hurry now to get back. Like so many who came to these parts, he’d underestimated how long a circuit of the lake would take. He quickened his pace, but the dog was slow. She plodded, burdened with age. He opened the gate to the churchyard and let the dog go first. There was no one around, apart from an old lady tending a grave. She took no notice of him as he passed her. He was a stranger, and as such a part of this place. The church itself was built for a time when the village had barely been inhabited. He found it hard to imagine the silence, the emptiness of it all back then, when just a few devout, impoverished souls had shared this rocky landscape.
He moved towards the gate at the other side of the churchyard, but the dog had disappeared into the undergrowth beneath a yew tree. He called her name. She didn’t come. He called her again. She was lying on the ground now, her head resting against a mound of something he couldn’t quite make out.
It was then that he heard it, the low of distress.
The dog barked at him.
She hadn’t found a rabbit, or a badger. She’d found a girl. She was sitting cross-legged on the ground, her head in her hands, sobbing deeply. In that moment, he came into a full understanding of that old hyperbole ‘crying your heart out’. It’s exactly what she was doing.
Beside her, there was me: lying on my back in the dirt beneath the yew tree. He saw straight away that I was dead.
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