The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  ‘It wasn’t a friendship, Danny. It was a relationship. We’ll probably face investigation as to how we allowed it to carry on without separating them. Fortunately, it’s all logged. But I don’t believe Annie has it in her to kill anyone, let alone Hope. I believe that even more fervently than I believed Hope would never have killed Annie. They’re troubled girls, yes, and if anyone who doesn’t know them hears about their history or listens to them talk for five minutes, it’s very easy to point the finger, but I am certain neither one of them is a killer. They’re good girls at heart, Danny, and capable of the most tender love. You know that.’

  ‘Tender.’ Danny seized on her word and repeated it. ‘I’m not sure I’d have called it tender. Passionate, perhaps. Obsessive, certainly. Not tender.’

  ‘But for them, it was real.’

  ‘And forbidden.’

  Forbidden. Of course it was forbidden. Children’s homes weren’t meant to be places where young people developed underage romantic attachments. They were meant to be places of care and safety, and possibly, at their very best, healing. It was why they only had single-sex homes – to prevent the complications of attraction, which were almost always damaging and disastrous at this age, for these kids. They hadn’t ever considered the possibility of a same-sex romance blossoming between the girls.

  ‘God, your generation are all so hetero-assumptive,’ Chloe had said, when Helen mentioned it at home over dinner one evening. ‘Honestly, all this stuff about single-sex schools because girls do better when they’re not distracted by boys. But what if – just what if – they’re gay? No one considers that. These designers of society really need to get themselves up to date.’

  Her daughter was so right-on. But she had a point.

  Now she said, ‘It was forbidden, yes. But I don’t think that…’ She paused, not sure what Danny had been getting at. ‘Do you?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s wrong to speculate. We don’t know what the evidence is. But I just wonder if they’d been trying to run away so they could be together, and it all just went wrong. It can’t have been murder. Not by Annie. If Annie had killed her, she’d have fled the scene.’

  ‘I would put all my money – which I admit isn’t much – on Annie not having killed her. It was an accident. Or Ace Clarke somehow wormed his way back into her life. Or her mother…’

  ‘There’s not a lot her mother could do from her prison cell.’

  Helen sighed, frustrated and impatient with the endless possibilities they could dream up about why a fifteen-year-old girl in their care was now lying on a slab in a hospital mortuary, waiting for a forensics team to examine her.

  Danny sighed hesitantly. Then he said, ‘Hope told me something last night, about Annie and her mother. At the time, my instinct was not to believe it, just write it off as a ridiculous story she invented after they’d had one of their crazy arguments. But now I’m not so sure…’

  ‘Then you’d better sit down and tell me what it was.’

  15

  Two pm. She’s been dead fourteen hours, more or less. I want to hit rewind on our lives and take us back, not just to yesterday but months back, to the day we first met. Maybe we could do it differently this time, slow things down so the connection between us doesn’t drive her mad. That was the trouble. Once she met me and started talking, all that buried history came rushing out, so fast she hardly knew what to do with it. It’s her biography that killed her, not me.

  I don’t blame her. I just wish there could have been another way, because I don’t see how I can get through the rest of my life like this. I’m only fifteen, and I knew her for just six months. What will it be like, twenty years from now? Will I still be able to recall her face and hear her voice in my head, or will time have blurred everything so all I’ll have by then is this endless ache and no memories to make any sense of it?

  Earlier, I thought maybe I should pretend she’s not dead, that she’s just gone away and will walk back through the door any minute, the way my mother used to whenever she went missing. But here’s a fact: I’d rather my mother were dead than Hope. If I could slide my mother on to a shelf at the mortuary and bring Hope home instead, I’d do it. Sometimes, I think I’d even bring Hope home dead, have her embalmed, keep her sleeping beside me so I’ll never have to face that hollow space in the bed.

  Can you marry someone after they’ve died? I’ll have to ask Helen. She’ll know.

  The trouble is, they’re all pissed off with me. I don’t mean they’re a little bit annoyed. I mean I lied to the police, and they’re completely mental about it. I could tell by the look on Gillian’s face the minute she saw me here and realised I wasn’t Hope.

  ‘Do you know how serious this is, Annie?’ she asked, later.

  I shrugged. Of course I knew, but I was not myself. It’s these clothes that do it. They took mine off me because they were cold and wet. They had to seize them and send them to forensics, I suppose, to find the evidence that I killed her. But the ones they gave me instead make me feel like someone else completely. Like my mother, or something. She’d have given the police shit as well. But she’s mad and wouldn’t have been able to help it.

  ‘I know you’re frightened,’ Gillian continued, ‘but trying to cover it with a tough front won’t get you anywhere. The best you can do is be polite and answer their questions truthfully. It will all be OK. If you did nothing wrong and you tell the truth, then nothing bad can happen.’

  That, for a start, was bollocks. I looked at her. ‘What are you, Gill? A fucking Sunday school teacher? Only a child would think like that. Or an idiot. Only an idiot would think the world is fair. It’s not fair. It’s shit. It’s always been shit.’

  Gillian went quiet then. There wasn’t much she could say to that. We both knew it was true. If the world was fair, Hope would still be here and our entire lives would have been different.

  ‘So,’ the detective says, leaning forwards in his chair, in love with his power. ‘Tell me what you were doing last night, the twenty-fourth of December, between the hours of seven pm and twelve am.’

  I keep my gaze on the floor. ‘No comment,’ I say.

  I’ve seen people do this on TV. It keeps you out of trouble until they come to their senses and un-arrest you.

  ‘When is the last time you saw Hope Lacey?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘How would you describe your relationship with Hope Lacey?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did Hope have any enemies that you knew of?’

  ‘No comment.’

  And so we go on, for ages and ages, until in the end they get sick of me suddenly and the woman blurts out, as if she can no longer control her rage, ‘Are you aware how serious it is that your friend is dead and you were the only person to be found near her body?’

  I look at her then, sharp as anything. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I’m aware of it.’

  And I don’t know why, but I start laughing. I’m not even sure where it comes from, this laughter, and once I’ve started, I can’t stop. I throw my head back and howl, and I’m aware of everyone looking at me, all of them thinking I’m mental and a murderer, but there’s no end to it. It’s like the first time I ever smoked a spliff, and my mouth was out of control and my face ached, but nothing really was funny at all.

  Gillian looks embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Strong emotion … It does this to people…’

  The police are unimpressed. I suppose I can’t really blame them. Only murderers would find murder funny.

  16

  She’s lost it. God, she’s completely lost it, and I want to slap her. She didn’t have to stay silent. There is so much she could have told them: Ace, the baby, Lara…

  She could use this as a chance to get Ace put away forever. It’s what she always wanted and I have to admit, I wouldn’t mind it either.

  I want to say, What are you playing at, Annie? You’re losing this. Can’t you see you’re losing this? But I hav
e to remind myself she’s in agony. I can feel it from here. I’m torn between wanting to drive her mad and wanting to lie down beside her now and wrap her up in me, the way I used to and never will again.

  The police are angry with her, and so is Gillian. Gillian started out by telling the officers she knew Annie well and there wasn’t a chance in the world she was capable of murder. She told Annie she was on her side and would be supporting her every step of the way. Now, though, she looks disgusted.

  They’ve ended the interview and dispersed for coffee. Another officer is leading Annie back to her cell, although with all the pathologists in the country probably busy slicing into their Christmas turkeys about now, they think they’ll have to bail her until after the post-mortem. Despite all their most patient and compassionate attempts to engage her, Annie hasn’t said a word about how I ended up dead on the ground beside her, or who else had been around to see it. She said she had no need of a solicitor, but was holding fast to her right to silence. Muzna, the policewoman, isn’t sure of the reasoning behind either of these decisions, and suspects Annie Cox either has no idea of the extent of the trouble she’s in, or is simply messing around, on purpose, to delay the investigation. Both, probably.

  Muzna sits on the swivel chair in her office, pours lukewarm coffee from her flask – it’s better than the crap from the canteen, even cold – and gives her colleague the lowdown. ‘I’m very wary of this suspect,’ she says. ‘Her appropriate adult says she’s known her for six months and she wouldn’t hurt anyone, despite her tough talk. I’m not so sure. She strikes me as a callous piece of work. Her answer to every question we asked her in there was silence, except when the DCI asked if she realised how serious it was that her little mate was dead. At that point, she laughed. Laughed as though the whole charade was nothing more than a hilarious joke.’

  Emma, the inexperienced young colleague, says, ‘Strong emotions and stressful situations can do that to a person, though. It’s not necessarily evidence of guilt.’

  ‘I don’t want to let this one get away without a fight. It’s not going to be an easy case to prove. It looks as though the victim drowned, so any DNA evidence is going to be hard to come by. Most of it will have been washed away. The post-mortem will show whether those cuts and bruises we saw on the body indicate a struggle or whether it was accidental. We’ll need to speak to the people who work at the home, find out about the victim’s past. If she was murdered, it will almost certainly have been by someone who knew her. It always is.’

  Emma nods. Then she says, ‘But we don’t know for sure that we’re dealing with a murder investigation.’

  ‘Not for sure, no. But it looks likely to me. And our young suspect is almost certainly at the heart of it, in some way or another.’

  Oh, Annie. You bloody idiot.

  Lara’s in her room again, hoping the police won’t want her story about what happened that night. She can’t face it – the endless drawings she’ll have to do for them, the acting-out of events with toys she’s too old for. At the moment, her mind is filled with the memory of her mother and the baby on the sofa. They’ve been there for hours. Hours and hours, it feels like, while Lara watches CBeebies. If she could understand what she’s seeing, Lara would know the baby is visibly draining her mother’s energy, leaving her entirely empty, extinguishing even the embers that might one day spark back into happiness.

  Her mother leans her head back against the cushions, closes her eyes and sinks into sleep. Lara, because she is only six now, has no notion of the depth of this exhaustion, how it is bone deep and how her mother will flip if anyone comes near her with a demand that puts an end to this brief respite before the night comes round to drain her again.

  Lara manoeuvres her way round the baby and pats her mother’s head. ‘Mummy?’ she says. She wants a snack, and some attention.

  Her mother jerks forwards. ‘What? What? Get off me! Get off!’

  Lara stares at her.

  Her mother shakes herself back. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s after seven. You need to go to bed.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘I don’t know where your father is. He said he’d be home early and I can’t do this without him. I can’t do it.’ She tugs at her hair. ‘He’s a bastard, Lara. A bastard, leaving me alone all day with this, and no car to go out in. Please turn the TV off. I can’t handle any more of that godawful singing.’

  Lara does as she’s been told, but then the baby wakes up and starts to cry. Lara’s mother puts her hands over her ears and goes on sitting there.

  Lara takes herself to her room and locks the door, even though she isn’t meant to. The bolt was there when they moved in, and her father keeps saying he’s going to take it off, but there is always so much else to do.

  There’s arguing downstairs again. She has no idea who started it. Her dad came home drunk and her mother was furious.

  ‘Just give me a break,’ she hears him say. ‘I’m putting in a sixty-hour week because that’s the way to the big promotion, that I have to get because nothing is ever enough for you. Let me have a pint after work, for God’s sake.’ Then he falls quiet while her mother rages, and the next thing Lara hears him say is, ‘I hate coming home. I can’t bear it.’

  It sounds as if he is crying.

  There is the usual banging then, and more shouting, and the clap of a hand coming down against skin.

  Someone declares they’ve had enough. She can’t remember who, but surely it must have been her father. There is a rush of footsteps on the stairs, then her bedroom door handle shakes violently, and there’s the sound of her father’s bellowing voice, ‘Open the door, Lara!’

  But she doesn’t. She sits quietly on her bed and covers her ears, the way her mother did earlier to escape the noise of the baby.

  He starts to kick. The wood fractures and splinters. Lara holds her breath and rolls into a ball and hopes he will never be able to see her.

  17

  I’m out. They bailed me on the grounds that they can’t do anything until after the post-mortem, and no one can carry that out till the festive season’s over. It took them ages, though. Interviews, a stern talking-to by some important-looking officer who took great delight in telling me he was a sergeant, as if he expected me to be impressed or intimidated. I wasn’t. Anyone who gets a boner from forcing people to obey all the tedious rules of life is not someone I’m going to be impressed by. Not ever … And he does get a boner from it. I could tell from his face.

  Then they read me the conditions of my bail, which were mostly that I’m not allowed to set foot out of the home till they call me back to the nick. Any attempt at flight and I’ll be returned to that cell quick as anything. Not that there’s anywhere for me to fly to.

  Gillian’s driving us back to the home in silence. She looks as though she’s seen as much of me as she can handle today. It’s the laughter that did it, but I hadn’t meant to laugh. I loved her. And now I’ve got to face my whole life with her gone, and I don’t think I can. It’s the feeling you get if you’re on top of a cliff looking down at the sea below – your stomach sways and you think you’re falling over the edge to the bottom, when really you’re just standing there, going nowhere, wishing you could be anywhere but here. That’s how I feel when I think of the rest of my life now. It’s the sickness of vertigo.

  Gillian takes the turning at the bridge by Clappersgate, and we wind along the road towards Great Langdale, past the mad evening walkers still hanging round the shores of Elterwater. Outside, dusk is falling thick and cold, the lake still and black beneath the dark contours of the mountains; and above it all, half hidden in smoke-grey cloud, a full winter moon casts its faint glow over the water.

  Finally, Gillian speaks, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘You aren’t helping yourself, Annie, when you behave the way you did in the police station.’

  I say nothing. She’s right, of course.

  ‘You’re not a bad girl, Annie. Not at all. And no one at Hillfoot believ
es for a minute that you…’ She stumbles over the words, as if they’re too much for her. ‘…That you had anything to do with Hope’s death. But when you give a false name and mess around and don’t co-operate, it gives a very bad impression and makes you look like a suspect. They’re the police, Annie. They have power. They can make your life very difficult if you don’t work with them.’

  I know this. I’m an idiot. I don’t know what came over me earlier.

  I think I’d quite like to die.

  The house, when we get there, looks just the same. The same lights are glowing at the windows, the same dark fells surround it, smoke rises from the same chimney. But I know that when I step inside, she won’t be there. She won’t be there and she never will be again, and as I walk through the front door, it feels like I’m falling to the bottom of a vast, empty well.

  Helen is in the kitchen. I know she isn’t meant to be. She’s meant to be at home with her kids. I suppose they called her in after they realised we were missing, or after the cops had come round to say one of us was dead.

  She takes one look at me and her whole face collapses into an expression of sympathy like I’ve never seen before. And then suddenly her arms are around me, like a mother’s round a child, and I’m crying and crying, which isn’t what I’d planned to do at all.

  When she releases me, my face is wet with tears and snot. She reaches for the box of tissues on the worktop and hands me the whole thing.

  ‘Are you hungry, love?’ she asks. ‘We haven’t had much of a Christmas dinner, but there’s some cake. I can cut you a slice if you want, make a brew if you want to talk.’

  My world is going to cave in if she carries on like this, with this godawful kindness, so I say, ‘Shouldn’t you be at home? Why don’t you bugger off?’

  ‘I’ve got time.’