by Perks, Heidi
Chapter Twenty-eight
Anna
Across the water in Weymouth, fireworks light up the sky. Midnight has come and gone. It is a new year now. A new start.
My whole body is so frozen in shock that I cannot move it, but then none of us is moving. I realise this when I do eventually step back and fall to the ground. It is too reminiscent of what happened before, I think, as I lean over the edge and cry out Grace’s name.
Now Nancy is beside me, using the torch from her phone, which does little to shed any light on the cliff face. Still, I know already, I don’t have to be told, that Grace isn’t alive. We heard her scream as it petered away while she tumbled to the bottom. There is little chance of survival.
All four of us crouch on the ground. My own fingers paw at the earth. I swear I can hear each one of our separate heartbeats over the rhythmic thud of the waves as they crash on to the pebbles.
Eventually I rock back, pulling my knees tightly against me. ‘Oh God,’ I groan. ‘Oh my God.’
I’m going to be sick. I roll myself over until I am on my knees throwing up, hanging my head, my eyes unfocused, my head spinning.
‘Someone needs to call 999.’ I am pretty sure it is Rachel who says this.
‘I’ll do it.’ This from Caitlyn, in no more than a whisper.
I can hear the beeps of a phone as the three digits are pressed. ‘There’s been an accident,’ Caitlyn is saying, her voice cracking under the strain of each word. ‘Crayne’s Cliff. Someone has fallen.’
I wipe my mouth, close my eyes. Everything is still rocking and spinning, which makes me feel like I might be sick again. But it is good that they are doing this, I think. In contrast to how we handled things all those years ago. Someone has already called the police. There has been no discussion about it; it has not crossed their minds that we might walk away without saying anything. My friends are good people. It is a thought that hits me sharply, just how much I wasn’t. Good.
‘What happened?’ Rachel says. ‘What actually happened?’
My heart gallops. It reminds me of the sound of Ethan’s heart when he was in my tummy. ‘What do you think I’m having?’ I had asked the midwife.
‘Well, if I had to guess I’d say you were having a girl,’ she had replied. ‘Or a very excited boy!’
I find myself thinking of my placid, calm Ethan now, and wishing beyond anything that I was cuddled beside him in his bed, not out here on the cliff edge.
‘What happened?’ Rachel is saying again, her voice clipped with panic. It is Nancy who is oddly mute. ‘I mean, I didn’t …’
Didn’t what? Didn’t see or didn’t do it?
I want the answers too, but like Nancy I don’t utter a word.
I know this wasn’t my fault, or at least not directly, because my arms had been ripped away from Grace. At the last minute maybe, but in time, and I had taken a step back, I wasn’t touching Grace in the moments before she went. Only I don’t know who had their hands on her and who didn’t.
‘Did she fall?’ Rachel asks. ‘Did she just slip?’
Come on, Nancy, say something, please. Put all of us out of our misery. What happened?
‘Because I wasn’t …’ Rachel must want to say she wasn’t anywhere near Grace either, only as soon as she does so she is implying someone else was, and right now all four of us are trapped in this tragedy together. We must not fracture or turn on one another. Not yet.
‘We need to go down there,’ Caitlyn says. She has finished the call. ‘The police will want to speak to us.’ How strange it is that Caitlyn is the one taking charge. It is so not the way I would have written it.
‘What did you tell them?’ Rachel asks her.
I feel a hand on my arm, pulling me up, so I obligingly stand because I need to do what they are asking of me. Be there for them as they are for me.
‘I told them there was an accident,’ she says. ‘They haven’t asked any more yet.’
‘But they will,’ Rachel says. ‘And I don’t even know what happened. Who does?’ She is searching all of us for a clue, desperate. ‘One of us must know.’
‘Honestly, I don’t,’ Caitlyn tells her. ‘I didn’t see. I was too busy pulling Anna off her.’
Caitlyn is right; I remember how she urgently spoke to me as she told me to get back from the cliff.
‘So …’ Rachel pauses and looks at Nancy, and I am standing now, facing her too.
But I don’t want to know, I realise. I do not want to know who might or might not have pushed Grace, because the fact is it doesn’t matter. We are all in this together, but worse than that, the only reason my friends are here is because of me. So whether Nancy pushed her too hard or not, ultimately it is my fault, and this is what I must tell the police.
‘I didn’t touch her,’ Nancy says. ‘I swear I didn’t … I didn’t actually touch her.’ She holds up her hands, her face is ghostly. Shards of moonlight catch her pale skin and make her look haunted. ‘She just … One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t.’
‘So it was an accident?’ Rachel asks, nodding. There are distant sounds of sirens. Whether or not they are getting closer it is hard to tell. ‘It must have been an accident. Because Anna wasn’t near her and all of us are saying we weren’t touching her, so she must have slipped. She should never have been that close to the edge in the first place,’ Rachel cries, as we begin stumbling back through the trees, towards the woods.
Now someone else is shouting my name. Ben is here and is coming our way.
‘We’ve just got to be honest,’ Rachel says. ‘All of us. We just have to tell the police exactly what happened. It was no one’s fault,’ she reiterates. ‘We just have to tell them the truth.’
Wednesday 1 January
As Marcus Hargreaves reaches his car, he pauses and looks back at the cliffs, wondering if anyone else at the station will be asking themselves the question that he is taunting himself with. Could they have known something like this might happen?
Three weeks ago Grace Goodwin had stood in the station and tried to report a crime, but the officers she spoke with had refused to believe she was right to be worried. And yet his first call this morning hadn’t been to wish him a Happy New Year, but to tell him there was a dead body.
His head is filled with the sight of it. He knows he won’t be able to get Grace’s face out of his mind. It brings back too many memories of what he saw twenty-two years ago, and there is too much of a link between that and the events of last night.
The thought of talking to the husband and the child sits hard in his chest. The little girl is only eight and it’s unbearable to think she will soon find out she has lost her mother.
It is not his case but he has offered to speak to them because he has got to know Grace Goodwin over the last couple of weeks, and he feels like he owes it to her to tell her family. They have talked to each other openly. They became friends of sorts as she listened to him and he shared with her the sordid details of his divorce and she with him the imminent demise of her marriage. Somehow that she was going through it makes her death seem sadder, he thinks, though he cannot begin to express why.
Maybe it is nothing more than the randomness of life. That it keeps spinning through its highs and lows until it suddenly stops at any one given point.
Once he has had the conversation with the family Marcus will speak to his Chief. He might not be in charge of finding out what happened to Grace but he wants to look at a cold case. He is no longer sure that Heather Kerr was alone the night she died and he needs to speak to Anna Robinson.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Wednesday 1 January
Anna
It is not the New Year any of us expected. Planned family lunches have been cancelled. None of us has slept, though not because of the usual celebrations that would have had us drinking and dancing into the early hours of New Year’s Day.
All eight adults are gathered around our kitchen table, Eric having joined us as soon as he was
told the news. All our children are upstairs, thrilled at the prospect of watching a movie together so early in the day.
One by one the others start to say they need to go home and try to catch up on some sleep. Or what sleep we can get when our heads are still spinning with thoughts of Grace and the words we exchanged with the detectives at the scene. Words that we have gone over and over between us.
Soon it is just me at the table. Ben has gone upstairs to see Ethan and the two of them are building a Lego fire station. I don’t know how he can do it but I am glad for him, making a pretence of normality for our son, while I continue to replay what I told the DCI hours earlier – wondering whether or not I said the right thing.
‘Grace was so close to the edge,’ I told him. ‘I remember someone trying to pull her back.’
‘Who was that?’ he asked me.
‘I think it was my friend, Nancy, but it was dark and all such a blur. None of us were near her when she fell.’
‘When you say you weren’t near her, how far away were you?’
‘Well, we were still close,’ I told him, ‘but we weren’t touching her, she just …’
‘Just what, Mrs Robinson?’
‘She just slipped. She just fell. I don’t know, the ground must have given way. But suddenly she wasn’t there.’
The DCI nodded. He must have known there’d be a team checking shortly, if they weren’t already up there. Forensics studying our footprints, the ground, how much our story stacked up. It had been too late for that to happen when it was Heather who had fallen off the edge of the cliff because no one had known she was gone for hours, and even then no one knew to be looking at the cliffs.
This is a very different story, and I have to keep reminding myself that whatever they might find I didn’t push Grace. As much as I might have wanted to at one point last night, I hadn’t done it. I am not to blame. I have told the police the truth.
And yet I feel so guilty.
I hang my head as tears cascade down my cheeks. Is it because I got what I wished for? I wanted Grace out of my life, and now she is. But I didn’t want her dead. My shoulders heave as I start to sob. I never wanted her dead.
The doorbell rings, pulling me up sharply. For a moment I hesitate, but when I don’t hear Ben’s footsteps I make my way to the front door. I can tell by the stance of the person standing on the other side of it – by the way they are holding themselves straight, stepped back from the door – that it is a formal visitor. As soon as I open the door I recognise Marcus Hargreaves.
‘Mrs Robinson?’ he asks me. His eyes are searching my face, possibly for some sign of recognition.
I nod.
‘I’m DS Hargreaves. I’m sorry to be bothering you this morning, so soon after what happened last night.’
‘It’s fine.’ I open the door wider, expecting he wants to come in.
He steps inside. ‘I’m sorry about your friend. It must have been a horrible thing to witness.’
‘It was. It—’ I don’t finish because I don’t know what to say.
‘I’m not on the case,’ he adds as he follows me through to the kitchen.
I offer him a coffee, which he declines.
‘I’m not here because of Grace.’
‘Oh?’ I gesture to one of the dining chairs and we both sit down.
‘I don’t know whether you remember me, but I was investigating the case of your friend, over twenty years ago, Heather Kerr?’
‘I do remember you,’ I say.
‘I don’t think I’d have recognised you,’ he goes on. ‘I did Grace, eventually. I met her when she came to report you missing.’
‘That was a misunderstanding,’ I tell him. ‘I wasn’t missing. I just needed some time …’
Hargreaves nods but he doesn’t comment. ‘I’ve actually met up with Grace a few times recently.’
‘Yes. She told me.’ I hear the wobble in my voice. He must be able to hear it, too. In the back of my mind I expected I would get a visit at some point after what Grace told me, but I didn’t imagine it would be so soon.
‘She talked to me a lot about things: what’s been going on in her life lately; her divorce; moving back here; you.’
I don’t trust myself to speak and so I say nothing.
‘She talked about your friendship when you were younger. It was interesting. It was a little … You were very close,’ he says, ‘by the sound of things?’
I do not like the anticipation of where he is going.
‘She talked about Heather,’ Hargreaves tells me, biting the corner of his lip as he studies me. My hands are clenched together under the table, slippery with sweat. Upstairs a shriek of laughter comes from Ethan’s room, and I think of him and Ben and how in just one moment everything can be shattered into tiny pieces.
‘That’s why I’m here,’ he is telling me, though his voice is beginning to blur into the haziness of the room. I am too hot all of a sudden, and desperate for a glass of water, but to get one I would need to move from the table and I am not sure my body could do that.
‘I didn’t …’ My mouth is moving and words are coming out but it feels as if I have no control over them. ‘I didn’t do it.’
But I wait for him to tell me that he believes I did. That from what Grace has told him he knows I was at the cliffs with Heather and I argued with her, and that for whatever reason I chose to keep this to myself and let the police search for a week. He will arrest me, charge me with murder or manslaughter perhaps, at the very least with obstructing an investigation.
A surge of nausea rises so quickly within me that if I wasn’t so rigid with fear, I know I would be sick again.
But then he says, ‘No. I didn’t think you did.’ He is looking at me questioningly.
I clamp my mouth shut.
‘I just read between the lines, Anna. A lot of what Grace told me didn’t make sense on the surface, but like I said, I met up with her a few times. I got the impression there was something she was trying to tell me in a roundabout way. She was ill; you know that, don’t you?’ He gently presses a finger against the side of his head. ‘And I think that something else was triggered in her in the last two weeks, which I’m thinking must be the divorce?’
Hargreaves pauses as if he is prompting me to add that there was something else too but right now I still cannot speak.
‘I was hoping if she kept talking to me I’d eventually find out what happened. I think Grace was there the night that Heather died.’
‘She didn’t say—’ I break off quickly, my mind galloping to keep up with what he is saying.
‘No. She didn’t actually say she was, but like I say, I definitely think it was where she was heading.’
I attempt to swallow the lump lodged in my throat.
‘I was worried about her, though. About her state of mind. I guess I was expecting something like this to happen. Deep down, you know?’
‘Something like what?’ I ask, my mouth painfully dry.
‘Last night.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘The way she was talking to me, she was so unhappy, so up and down. I blame myself for not stepping in more, that’s what I’m thinking. I could have stopped her …’ He trails off, letting out a sigh as he looks away.
‘You’re saying you think she jumped?’
‘Is it possible?’ he asks.
‘I … I don’t know,’ I admit, as my mind flashes back to the night. ‘I mean, it’s possible. It all happened so quickly, I thought she fell but …’
Did she? I think. Was it possible?
‘She loved you,’ he tells me. ‘I could see that much. I mean, she was a bit all over the place, but that came through as clear as day – what good friends you and she were – so I’m sorry.’ He leans across the table and reaches a hand towards me. ‘I’m sorry that you’ve lost such a good friend.’
Epilogue
Two weeks later, we hold the funeral for Grace. Two weeks to the day, because they had to k
eep her body for a post-mortem, investigate, and rule accidental death.
When the investigating officer called me with the news I burst into tears, possibly through sheer relief that there would be no more investigation, partly because I still felt so terribly guilty.
I look around at the crowd that is leaving the church. There were a surprising number of people in attendance, given that Grace knew so few of them. Some are parents from Year 4 and there are even a few women who Grace and I went to school with so many years ago, who heard the news, as of course everyone has in Clearwater. A mix of faces from my past and present are there, and I turn my head and lean into Ben, who wraps an arm around me.
‘I need to find Catherine,’ I say. ‘I don’t know where she went.’
‘She’s with Matilda.’ He nods across the path to where Grace’s mum and daughter are sitting on a bench together.
‘Oh God,’ I whisper, closing my eyes for a moment before opening them to look over at them. Tears start to spill at the sight of them together. In some ways I feel like I have learned more about Grace in the last two weeks than I ever knew in our two decades of friendship. Conversations with Catherine, piecing together the reality of Grace’s childhood, as we pored through pictures and remembered stories.
‘All she wanted was attention and acceptance,’ I told Ben one evening. ‘She didn’t get any from her dad, and she felt Catherine’s focus was divided between her and me.’
Catherine feels guilty for that, she has told me. ‘I should have reprimanded her for cutting up your dress,’ she said only last week on the phone. ‘I often look back and think I didn’t give her the chance to know what was right or wrong. I just let her get away with things. She grew up with no boundaries. I let her down.’
It was a funny thing, to feel sorry for Grace that she hadn’t been punished for what she did, but it got me wondering if maybe Catherine was right. Grace was crying out for attention, but she was always being ignored.