The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  “We have a new face here tonight,” Vera said when everybody was settled. She smiled at me. A few of the others followed suit. “You might remember her. Jilly Chambers. She and her brother Alex—”

  “We know who she is,” one woman murmured. I was surprised to realise I recognised her, even after all this time. Andrea Davies. She was the mother of Charlotte and Hazel, abducted in 1997, a year before me and Alex. I vaguely remembered the way it had made everybody nervous. It was like the memory of Princess Diana’s death. Something that shook the nation but had meant little to me.

  Mostly, though, I remembered the bitter way Andrea had spoken to my parents, while I was stood there watching. The way she’d said we simply didn’t have the same experience. Mum had been devastated. Andrea had never been able to bury either of her daughters, and she was angry that my mother, somehow, still had me.

  Andrea’s expression wasn’t hostile now, just tired. She looked sadly at me, and then at Vera.

  “She has every right to be here. Same as us,” Vera said, before she could protest. As though this was old ground.

  Andrea folded her hands in her lap but didn’t argue.

  “She lost somebody, too,” a woman agreed, her tone firm. I turned, catching sight of a lady I thought must be Jaspreet Singh. She was here alone. Randeep and Jaswinder had been taken right before Alex and me. The same year. Just four months earlier. I felt my blood chill at the vague tickling memory, of a child’s hollow face in the dark, an old plastic toy clutched between frozen fingers. I shivered. Where had that come from? “And goodness knows we need all the support we can get,” Jaspreet added. “People can be cruel.”

  Andrea shrugged, but I was paying more attention to Jaspreet, to the way she wouldn’t meet my gaze even as she defended me, the way she stared resolutely at the tissue she held in her lap. Her hands were shaking, as if she was holding in something else she wanted to say, but she was afraid to voice it.

  “What do you mean?” I asked gently.

  “That’s what these meetings are for,” Vera said. “Support.”

  “That’s not what she’s talking about though.” I leaned towards her. “Is it? Has something specific happened?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “Don’t badger her,” Andrea cut me off, a little of her old aggression leaking through. “You can’t just barge into this safe space and demand people talk to you.”

  “I’m just asking what happened.” I frowned. “Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

  I turned back to Jaspreet. She was three or four chairs away. The vicar, sat to her right, reached out to give her arm a reassuring squeeze.

  Jaspreet let out a wet-sounding sigh, but still refused to look at anybody. “It’s – it’s why I asked if we could meet, actually,” she said.

  Vera leaned in. “You didn’t say there was a reason, Jas.”

  “I know. It’s just… I think somebody has been – following me. The last few days.” Jaspreet picked at a loose thread on her sari. “It’s – it’s not a huge deal, but it’s shaken me up. I wondered if it was all in my head, or if anybody else…”

  “It’s not a reporter?” I asked. Maybe it was a misunderstanding? But Jaspreet was shaking her head. “Or some kind of prank?” I thought about what the police had said to me and a squirming feeling started in my belly.

  “I don’t think so. It’s not very funny.”

  “Did you tell the police?”

  “Not yet,” she said. She fiddled with the tissue in her lap, picked at her sari some more. “I thought I was just being paranoid. Thursday, he, whoever it was, left a football outside my front door. I brushed that off as just kids, or something. You know. But… Randeep loved Man U, and yesterday I found a football shirt on my washing line.”

  I thought of Molly, about what she’d said. We’d all been through so much that we didn’t know whether to trust our emotions, but this surely couldn’t be a coincidence. I fought a shiver. But… the Father was dead. Why would somebody start playing tricks on us now?

  I thought back to all of the times I’d felt like I was being watched, even before the doll in my bed, the candles in my kitchen. How long had this person been watching us?

  “You’ve got to go to the police. You’ve got to tell somebody,” I said, panic making my voice shaky.

  “What if that makes him angry?” Jaspreet had gone pale. “It’s got to be somebody I know, right? Somebody who knew the kids.”

  I bit my lip so hard I tasted the first coppery tang of blood on my tongue, but I couldn’t answer.

  “How did you know?” somebody else asked me. A woman with long blonde hair who hadn’t said anything before. She had Vera Bailey’s fine, pointed nose – a sister maybe, but much younger. Another daughter?

  “What?” I said.

  “How did you know to ask her if something was wrong?”

  “I didn’t. Not exactly. I just…” I gripped my phone tighter. Wished that Harriet was in here with me. “Somebody has been in my house. I thought it was a break-in at first, but nothing’s gone. It feels more like a mean trick.” Or a threat. I didn’t say that out loud.

  “Did he leave gifts for you, too?” Jaspreet asked.

  My blood ran cold at the word gifts. Suddenly I thought of Monica. Of what she had said to me on the phone.

  Leaving gifts at my house is fucking weird.

  NINETEEN

  Harriet

  I WAS STILL IN the car when Erin tumbled out of the meeting. The sky was dark, speckled with only one or two visible stars, and the floodlights over the church doors made everything sweat silver. Erin was like a ghost, pale and fluid, rushing towards the driver’s side where I sat with a cigarette in my mouth.

  I wound the window down and tried to pretend I hadn’t been watching the door for long minutes already. The darkness was making me antsy. Twice I’d sworn I could see somebody standing behind my car, a shadow in the rear-view mirror, and twice I’d looked to find nobody there. Erin’s nerves were rubbing off on me.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “Come with me.”

  I climbed out of the car, saying nothing, and let Erin lead me away. Nobody else had come out of the church yet, but as Erin forged a way around the back of the building, where a bramble hedge grew and stretched along the side of a small, overgrown grassy garden, I heard the doors swing open and shut and then the sound of voices spilling into the night.

  She had a frantic kind of energy about her, as if she wanted to be anywhere but here and yet needed to get something off her chest – fast.

  “Sorry, we can go in a minute. I just need to be outside for a minute, away from everything. I need to breathe.”

  We came to a spot that might once have been a vegetable allotment, earth churned along the edges and tangles of weeds in between. It was too dark to see much, but Erin pulled a lighter from her pocket and lit a cigarette. Then clicked the lighter again so the flame hovered, for a long few seconds, in the darkness.

  “Didn’t go well then?” I said eventually.

  She let the flame die, the golden glitter in her eyes fading. “It was… It was hard, seeing them again.”

  I could tell she was holding something back. I waited until the sound of engines starting in the car park had faded to a distant hum. Until there was just us and the darkness.

  “What happened?”

  She didn’t look at me. I felt a tide swell in my chest, an emotion I wasn’t familiar with. Worry? Or something else?

  “I won’t write about it. About this conversation.” I threw the words out before I could change my mind. Erin blinked.

  “What?”

  “I think we’re beyond that now.”

  I realised as I said it that I didn’t know what I meant by that. Did I mean the book, or did I mean something else? Whatever it was that was happening between us?

  “Are we?” Erin asked.

  She leaned closer.

  “Yes.”

  Erin let out a
long breath.

  “Okay, look. I have this… feeling. I haven’t got any proof. I don’t know if it’s a memory or if it’s wishful thinking, but I can’t help wondering if this isn’t random after all.”

  “What do you mean? The break-in?”

  “All of it. I think he – the Father – was looking for certain candidates. I keep coming back to the sibling thing, how he always took two children, when one would have definitely been easier. It must be some compulsion, or there’s something about physically getting one kid to protect the other that gets him off.” She paused. “I thought he was dead. He is dead. He’s got to be. But somebody is out there right now – fucking with more than just me. And whoever it is, something has obviously triggered them.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.” I stepped back, away from Erin’s intoxicating warmth, and let the cool wind chill me back to consciousness. “The other families have had break-ins too? Are you saying that it’s connected to what happened to you?” I thought of my aunt and uncle, alone with just a collie for company. Were they safe?

  “No. Not break-ins. But Molly said she felt spooked, and tonight Randeep and Jaswinder’s mum said somebody had left gifts for her. Followed her. None of the others have had any problems. But it’s like a selection,” she said the word like a curse. “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s like an echo of the Father,” I said. “It seems random, but careful. It’s probably some true crime nerd just getting his jollies. The randomness is bound to help him get away with it like it did back then—”

  “Except I don’t think that’s why the Father did it,” Erin pointed out. We’d bounced back to him again, like an old scab neither of us could stop picking at. “I don’t think it was just to avoid being caught. Look at the kids he stole. They started out looking kind of similar, didn’t they? Your cousins and the Evans kids, all of them were small, white, with brownish hair and dark eyes, and they were a bit younger. Then after that, Morgan. As if something wasn’t right at first, and he needed to try something else. A girl. And then two girls. And then Randeep and Jaswinder, brown skin and older again… It’s almost like he wanted to sample children across the board. The only thing they have in common in the end is that they’re siblings, and around the same ages.”

  “So…?”

  “I don’t know.” Erin blew out a frustrated breath. “There must have been something important about brothers and sisters – regardless of gender, or even biology if we bring Oscar and Isaac into the mix. And if it’s not biology then it must be the relationship he’s looking for. Maybe it’s a challenge, to see which sibling lasts longer. Whether one protects the other. Or, maybe he hates siblings because his sibling hurt him. I don’t know. Morgan and Paul were found so many months apart, it makes me wonder why he’d keep Morgan so long? But then, we don’t know how long he kept the others. The ones that weren’t found…”

  She lapsed into silence.

  “Did Jaspreet tell the police about the gifts?” I asked. “They surely get this all the time with people affected by high-profile cases. There are so many awful, obsessive people in the world.”

  “No. I told her to tell them though. I genuinely don’t think she knew what to do about it, since so far it’s not been… I mean, it’s not actually been harmful. He didn’t break into her house or threaten her. It’s like a power play, but I just can’t work it out. It feels like we’re all in this stupid game but only this guy knows the rules. Everything is calculated.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Whoever this person is, they obviously don’t want to hurt you.”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I think we do. He could have hurt you when he broke into your house the second time – you were right upstairs – but he didn’t.”

  “What do I do?” There was more fear in her voice now. “I don’t want to go home. And I can’t stay at Mum’s forever.”

  “You could call the police,” I suggested. “Explain that you’re afraid. Tell them about Jas.”

  “You think I haven’t thought of that? But if I call them after last night they’ll probably just tell me to stop wasting their time again. What proof do any of us have that this isn’t just a big, fat, unfunny joke? A few candles and a football shirt? Maybe we’re all just collectively losing the plot. Like you said, he could have hurt me but he didn’t.”

  “Come home with me then.” The words were out before I could think about them. “Stay at mine. It’s safe there, quiet. Get some rest and see what happens when Jaspreet reports the gifts.”

  I didn’t think Erin would agree. But then, she did. And I didn’t know whether that was a good thing. The shadows around us seemed to stretch and shiver and I found myself looking over my shoulder as we reached the car.

  There was nobody there.

  TWENTY

  Harriet

  MY FLAT FELT HOLLOW and empty after Erin’s busily decorated house, where we’d stopped to grab some of her things and her car. The whole rest of the drive, the lonely silence eating me, I’d reconsidered my offer. Thought about taking it back as soon as we arrived.

  But I couldn’t just send her home alone. So I said nothing. Now, as we came up in the lift to my floor, Erin let out a small whistle.

  “Nice place,” she said.

  Erin dumped her bags unceremoniously in the hallway, not caring about the people in the flat below – or perhaps simply not thinking about them. I watched her eyeing my sparse furniture, the pictures of Thomas, and Auntie Sue, Uncle Greg, Mikey and Jem on the mantel.

  “Do you want a drink?” I asked, as much to distract her as anything else.

  She nodded, still looking around.

  “Tea?”

  “Got anything stronger?” she asked. Now she looked at me. I saw a spark of panic in her gaze, as though she felt as out of place here as I felt she was. I softened. None of this was as bad for me as it was for her.

  “Sure.”

  I poured a glass of wine for me, and the last finger of a glass of rum for her, mixed with some flat Diet Coke. She didn’t complain. She wandered around my lounge, eyeing the cheap TV which I hardly ever watched, the stacks and stacks of books on one wall.

  “Non-fiction,” she said, pulling a face. “Politics? History? Who even are you?”

  I fought the blush that prickled my cheeks.

  “I like research. Facts. Truths—”

  “Nothing is true,” Erin said bitterly. “Everybody has their own individual truth.”

  “That means there are truths, though,” I pointed out. “Just because it’s not the same truth doesn’t make it exist any less. Anyway I like biographies too, and thrillers.” And true crime, but I didn’t mention that.

  “Figures.”

  She sank onto my sofa, cupping her glass like it was sacred. She looked exhausted, her face pale and her blue eyes almost silver. I wished, again, that I did have fairy lights, or something other than the stark bare bulb overhead and simple lamps dotted around. Everything was too bright, too clinical.

  “I’m not going to lie, this is a bit weird,” she said.

  “You’re telling me?” I took a big gulp of my wine. “But I wasn’t going to let you worry about a place to stay—”

  “I could have found a hotel or something. Or just sucked it up and gone home.” Erin blushed. I noticed, as she knew I would, that she didn’t mention any friends she might stay with. Not even the person she’d been texting. She’d been fiddling with her phone again in the car, as though she was hoping for a better offer, but as far as I could tell nothing had come of it.

  I thought, not for the first time, how similar we might be, if not for this awful thing that had happened to her. We’d both lost our fathers young, both had grown up with an older brother, although the age gap was larger between me and Thomas. I felt a pang then, sudden and painful, an echo of Erin’s loss. What would it be like to lose Thomas? His moving halfway across the world and only being able to Skype was painful enough, but he was stil
l there. I’d emailed him again today, but I wasn’t sure if he’d seen it yet.

  Erin picked up her phone again. The way she held it made me realise something. She was afraid again, more than the low-key concern of the last few days.

  “Erin,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “You mean aside from all of the shit I’ve been going through for the last week?” She forced a big gulp of her drink. “Sorry. That’s…I just…”

  “Just what?” I asked gently. I moved over to the sofa, to sit beside her.

  “There’s something I want to tell you,” she said. “It’s – about the phone calls and stuff I’ve been making. I have… So, I have an ex.”

  I found a surprised bubble of laughter in my throat, although it wasn’t funny.

  “Is that what you’re worried about? Erin, I’m not—”

  “No,” she cut me off. “No, I mean… I was worried about her, a bit, before. At first I thought it was because last time I saw her we had a fight. We’d been broken up and I let it get messy. I tried to call her, after. She ignored me but I kept texting, calling, you know. To make sure she was okay. I spoke to her, finally, and she was freaked out. She mentioned something about somebody leaving gifts.”

  “Do you think he’s been there?” I asked slowly. “Do you think it’s the same person doing all of this?”

  Erin’s lip began to tremble. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s nothing. I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried calling her tonight, too. I don’t want her to think I’m some psycho who won’t leave her alone but God, Harriet, I’m really freaked out, especially after what Jaspreet said. Maybe I should call the police – but Monica doesn’t know about me, she doesn’t know anything about my past, and I don’t want to scare her by sending cops to her house if everything’s fine. And I don’t want to get in trouble again.”

  For the first time I realised how naive Erin was. She looked like she wanted me to reassure her, to tell her that everything was going to be okay. I reached out and rested my hand on her arm.

  “Would you feel better if we went to see her?” I asked. “That’ll reassure you, and me, and we can talk to her, get her to let the police know that something is going on if that’s what’s happening. If Jaspreet gets in touch too they’ll have to appreciate the severity of this. Besides, if he’s been leaving her gifts, she might have noticed something useful, something we can tell them.”