‘She doesn’t want Tonia associated with Abigail.’
‘“Associated with Abigail”?’ said Lillian.
‘She means, with the Abigail White case.’
Abigail White. Mrs Dillon would have known the name. She would have remembered the campaigns Robert waged, week after week, and then every month, every year. I understood the horror she would have felt when the full story came to light. So much worse than she could have imagined.
‘But why?’ said Lillian.
‘She has her reasons,’ I said slowly. ‘She’s going through a custody battle. There are accusations of neglect. She’s worried a trial like this will only make her look worse.’ I thought of the photograph I’d seen, a paparazzi shot, stuck up on a website. In it you couldn’t see Tonia’s face, only her small form, backwards-facing to the camera, Mrs Dillon pushing through a crowd of journalists with Tonia’s legs wrapped round her waist. Her expression is hard and focused, her mouth a straight line. She’s holding a hand up, palm out, to the camera – a stop sign, keeping everyone at bay.
In the silence on the line that followed, I could sense my sister gathering her thoughts. ‘So the whole trial will be focused on Abigail now? She won’t be just a corroborating witness?’
‘Yes.’ I stayed silent, waiting for the meaning of it to sink in. I waited for Lillian to ask the next question. ‘And what about you then? Will they call you to testify?’
‘They haven’t yet.’
‘But they might?’
‘Yes.’
‘And if they do, Annie – will you tell them what happened?’
‘I—’
‘Even though it won’t make a difference? Even though it can’t possibly help?’
‘Lillian … I honestly don’t know.’
After telling Lillian, I stopped talking about the court case. What mattered was that he was going on trial. DS McCarthy and his colleagues had done their job and now it would rest in the hands of a jury. They had my further statement, that form I had signed, legally attesting: I don’t know this man. There was nothing more my testimony could add, nothing that would help the case and nothing – Lillian had assured me – that would change the outcome anyway.
So when three days later the phone rang, and Robert picked it up and I read at once from the look on his face that it was DS McCarthy, I thought he was only calling to say everything was on track. Even when he told us we had to come to the police station, it didn’t cross my mind that anything was wrong.
We left Abigail at home with Jess and the twins, playing another complicated card game. DS McCarthy had said he’d only need us for half an hour at most. At the station, he was waiting for us at the front desk and it was only when I saw the hardness in his eyes, that same hardness that had been there from the start, that I felt the flicker of unease in my stomach.
The room he led us to was hot and close – no windows. I hadn’t been in this one before. There were no files, no papers, nothing on the table, only two chairs laid out – waiting for us. We both sat down.
‘What’s this about?’ said Robert. He sat on the edge of his chair, as though ready to get up again at any moment.
DS McCarthy’s grey gaze fell on us both. ‘Something is bothering me. Something in my mind still isn’t adding up. I want you both to listen very carefully to this, then afterwards tell me if there’s anything I should know.’
My heart slipped in my chest. ‘Anything, like what?’
And Robert said: ‘Listen to what?’
But the detective didn’t answer, just clicked a button on the tape player and I jumped at the sudden creak of static. A hum, a hiss, then disembodied voices burst into the room, two men talking, questions and answers. He didn’t explain anything, he didn’t ask for our consent and I realized something about this was all wrong; this was something underhand and unofficial. As the noise filled the room, DS McCarthy leaned back in his seat, as though the sounds were nothing to do with him.
And your hours of work?
Mondays to Fridays, 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 3 p.m. to 6. p.m.
Only? So on this particular Saturday, you weren’t working?
No.
It was like a radio play, the voices back and forth, a strange, meaningless conversation. ‘What is this?’ said Robert. ‘What are we supposed to be hearing?’
‘Keep listening,’ said DS McCarthy. ‘You’ll see.’
What were you doing instead that day, at – say – four in the afternoon?
I was at home.
At home? Are you sure?
Or maybe I went out driving.
Which is it? Home or driving. At 4 p.m.
I froze.
I was out driving.
Uh-huh. And while on this drive, you met a little girl.
I curled my hands around the underside of my chair, letting the metal dig into my palms, the sting an anchor as the dizziness rose up.
She was playing outside. We got talking. She wanted some of my sweets. It was drizzling. Her coat didn’t have a hood.
You got chatting, gave her a sweet; it was wet, you thought she was underdressed.
I knew what this was. ‘The interview.’ My voice was barely above a whisper. ‘This is his police interview.’
‘That’s right.’
‘But you can’t play us this,’ said Robert. ‘It isn’t legal to play us this.’
DS McCarthy’s voice was steely. ‘Please just keep listening.’
Then what?
I said she could come and get dry in my car… so we did that. But she wasn’t really drying. The heater only really works when the car’s going. So we drove around a bit.
You drove off with Tonia. With no one’s permission.
Tonia, Tonia, everything about Tonia. I couldn’t understand why the detective was doing this. What was it he thought we could possibly know? The recording hissed on.
All right. What then?
We drove round the block. But she’d got too wet. So I took her to my house. So that she could put her clothes on my radiators.
You could have taken her back home. To her home.
I told you. It was raining. She’d have been back in the garden, outside, getting wet all over again.
All right. You drove her to … 15 Martins Road, your own address? How did Tonia seem then?
I don’t know. The cold was making her cry. She hadn’t liked the car. She’d stopped talking to me by then.
You don’t think she might have been scared, that maybe she wanted to go home, that she wanted her mummy?
‘We don’t want to hear this,’ said Robert. But neither of us moved.
There was nothing for her to be scared of. I made sure she had her seatbelt on. And her mum had put her outside in the cold and wet. She was better off with me, at my house. I kept her indoors.
For two nights.
I was waiting for the weather to pick up.
Uh-huh. But she tried to get out, didn’t she? There was a struggle.
I don’t remember that.
She has bruises.
I covered my eyes with my hands, trying to block out the images his words conjured up.
‘Keep listening, please.’
I don’t remember.
Fine. Let’s skip forwards a couple of days. Why did you run off and hide when you discovered Tonia gone from your house? Why didn’t you go out looking for her?
Because I’d realized what had happened. Because I realized Abi was gone too.
I let go of the chair. My hands had gone limp at the sound of her name.
So what did you think had happened?
I didn’t think, I knew. She’s such a good girl, Abi. She found a twenty-pound note once, one of the rare times I took her outside. It was just lying there on the pavement. She told me we should hand it in to the police. To the police – twenty pounds! Who taught her that? But that’s the way she thinks. So I knew that’s what she’d done with Tonia. Gone to hand her in.
Robert would have taught
her that, good citizenship, a tiny instruction that in the end had saved her. But I was struggling to breathe. ‘Turn this off,’ but I was speaking the words down into the table; I couldn’t seem to look up at the detective.
‘Not yet.’
And Abi – Abigail – is your… daughter? Niece?
Not exactly.
Then what exactly is your relationship with her?
You can say, I take care of her. In a way I’ve been watching over her, caring for her, her whole life.
His voice was so bizarrely unconcerned, dreamy, it made the hairs on my neck stand up.
Oh yes?
When she came to me, it was like a miracle. At the station steps, I’d thought that was it. I was simply wandering outside in the rain and then suddenly, out of nowhere, there she was. Well, after that, I gave her everything. I played with her, read to her, I made her a room just like her own …
And Abigail’s family? What about them?
Her family? Do you know, I think her own family meant for me to have her.
‘Stop the tape.’ I should get out of this room right now, I thought. ‘Stop the tape!’
A button clicked. The sound cut off. The room echoed with the silence. When I eventually raised my head, those grey eyes of DS McCarthy’s were boring straight into mine and I couldn’t look away because if I did, what he would read into that?
‘You told us that you didn’t know him.’
I shook my head. No no no. ‘We didn’t, we don’t. Even Casssingham didn’t say otherwise, did he? On the tape, that isn’t what he claims.’
‘So why does he say it? That you meant for him to have her? That he made her a room just like her own?’
‘We don’t know. We don’t know. We’ve told you we don’t know who Cassingham is.’ Robert took my hand in his. ‘You shouldn’t have done this. You had no right making us listen.’
My legs weren’t my own but I managed to stand. I leaned on Robert and let him lean on me.
DS McCarthy stood up, opening the door for us. We were too shaken and too stunned to argue or challenge him. The detective nodded as we passed, as though he was on our side again, sharing our pain.
‘But like I said: if there’s anything else.’
Outside we sat in the car park for the longest time. I felt sick; in the van the smell of oil and engine grease turned my stomach in a way it had never done before. Beside me, Robert was white and silent. I tried to read what he was thinking, what he’d made of those sickening words.
‘Robert. That man – Cassingham – he was living in a dream, a fantasy. DS McCarthy can’t see that, but it’s true.’
Robert let out a long exhale. I had to show him that it wasn’t about us, that DS McCarthy had this all wrong. The detective seemed determined to prove we were complicit, that we were hiding something, that our family was to blame. But whatever I had done, whatever mistakes I had made, I needed Robert to know it was never like that.
I kept thinking of how Robert and I had met: Abigail and I stuck on Steep Hill, her new scooter broken, a stone jammed in the wheel and me loaded with shopping bags from Lincoln’s department stores, unable to fix it. A stupid mess we’d got into – who takes a four-year-old on a scooter up Steep Hill? Then Robert appeared, crouching down, unjamming the stone, walking up with us, helping Abigail wheel her scooter to the top. That day, and for so long after, he’d been there for me and Abigail and now, more than ever, I needed him at my side.
‘He must have breached all kinds of protocols to do that,’ he was saying. ‘We should report him. I’m going to report him.’
I was afraid that would only make things worse though. I tried my very best to steady myself and for once be the one to stabilize our world. ‘I think I know why he did it,’ I said. ‘I never told you before, but I think it explains why he’s so suspicious of us.’
I leaned my head back against the rough covering of the passenger seat. ‘There was another case he worked on in Leicestershire. A boy went missing from his grandparents’ house. People had seen a man in the area, hanging about in all the wrong places. DS McCarthy wasn’t convinced.’
‘DS McCarthy was involved?’
‘Yes. It was a few years ago.’ I had pieced together the scenario by reading the statements the Leicestershire force had released, the forum threads, the blogs.
‘Well, so what happened?’
‘They arrested the strange man and spent days questioning him. All that time, DS McCarthy suspected someone else. He suspected someone within the family. When they found the child, it proved he’d been right.’
‘The grandparents?’ said Robert.
I nodded. ‘Grandmother. But by the time they found him, the little boy was dead.’
Chapter 22
Wednesday 21st August:
Day 87
JESS
When they came home, Uncle Robert got tea ready in silence. I heard the shower running for ages upstairs. When Auntie Anne came back down, her make-up was washed off and her whole face looked bare and defenceless. Abigail and I had planned to stay up with a movie that night, but in the end we all went to bed early.
I didn’t hear her go back downstairs, even though she must have passed our bedroom door. And it was only because of the heat that Abigail and I slept with the window open and I caught the smell of smoke. I mistook it for cigarettes at first – I pictured my cousin smoking. But she was there, asleep, next to me. The fire was outside.
She had been careful, my aunt. She’d set up a space on the decking and she was using the barbecue grill – the one that had stood there since the caravan holiday, still waiting to be cleaned. The flames didn’t burn so high and the crackle and pop was strangely comforting. For a while, I watched her from the bedroom window, half mesmerized.
When I went downstairs, I felt the current of night air that streamed through the ground floor. The glass double doors of the living room stood open onto the back patio. The thin white curtains billowed, curling back on themselves in the cooling breeze. Inside, the living room glowed blue. On the low table in the middle of the room, my aunt’s laptop lay open, lit up like a ghost. The blue-white glow of the screen, the fire outside – like the moon and the sun, circling together through the night.
The smell of smoke was stronger now, and through the shifting gaps in the curtains I could see the low flames, orange and gold. My aunt stood with a heavy box-file cradled in her arms, in her pink quilted dressing gown, the one I always associated with her. One by one, she pulled papers from the file and laid them on the little fire. I recognized the box-file, recognized those pages. They were all the cards and letters my aunt and uncle had received over the years. So many condolences, so many offers of support. So many reminders that Abigail was missing. It was like my aunt was letting go of them now, one by one.
Against wisps of the grey-smelling smoke, the open laptop shone up at me, quietly beckoning. I don’t remember walking forwards, I don’t remember sitting down in front of it. But I must have done, because I remember the screen right in front of me, glowing large.
The screen showed an email account – my aunt’s – and an email. Written to [email protected]. To my dad.
An email. And a quiet little box, blocking the words, asking, Delete draft or continue?
Ahead, through the curtains, my aunt went on placing sheets of paper into the fire, without turning, without seeing me. Snowflakes of ash spiralled up into the air. I watched my aunt watching them, her back to me. My hand reached forward and pressed on the mouse pad. I clicked on the message box, pulling it to one side. I held it there, the tip of my finger turning white. Text filled the preview pane.
Fraser, I don’t know who else to turn to. I’ve tried to speak to Lillian but she doesn’t understand or doesn’t want to hear. But you’ve always believed in facing the truth, and you know as much as Lillian does what happened. It was just one moment, one stupid moment on that train, but now every time I look at her, I’m more convinced than ever that i
t matters. She seems so angry, Fraser, and I don’t think it’s just about what he did, is it? All along it wasn’t just about him. It’s about us, her family and what I did.
Fraser – I know you believe that too …
Something in the fire outside crackled and snapped. I let go. The text box sprang back to the middle of the screen, covering the text. The file in my aunt’s arms was empty now. She must have caught my movement as I stood up, seen my outline as I ducked out of the room.
‘Jess?’
But before she could be sure, I was gone.
All the next day, I must have seemed so distracted. Whenever Auntie Anne asked me anything, I kept answering ‘What?’ and then she would look at me with a strange look on her face. I didn’t know what to do. From the bedroom window, there was no sign of the barbecue, no ashes, just the sun-dried decking and thin brownish grass. If I’d wanted to, I could have pretended even to myself that it was nothing but a dream.
Instead, in the afternoon, when Auntie Anne had taken the twins to the play park and Abigail was curled in her bed, asleep, I took a scrap of paper from my cousin’s desk and wrote a note. Then I quietly let myself out.
It took me half an hour to walk there – Dad’s practice was on the outskirts of town. It was hot, the sun pulsing. The hottest it had been all summer, it felt. A familiar figure was coming out as I reached the entrance, pretty smile and brisk gestures as she dug out her sunglasses, squinting in the glare. Shelley, the receptionist. ‘Hi there. He’s nearly done for the day,’ she said. ‘You can wait for him upstairs if you like.’
I climbed the steep flight as the door banged shut behind her. Upstairs, the waiting room was empty, only a clunky fan whirring in the corner. I sat down in Shelley’s swivel chair and stared at the box of stickers that she kept on the desk to dole out to the kids that wriggled and squealed when my dad poked their gums. Dad always said he found that the hardest part of his job. You can’t explain to them, he’d say, that you’re not a bad man. The stickers though, Shelley would say, made up for a lot.
At last, the door to the consulting room opened and out he came, dressed in his normal clothes, no smock or mask, just Dad. His eyebrows jumped when he saw me. ‘Jess – what are you doing here?’
Little White Lies Page 17