The Heights

by Louise Candlish

  December 2021

  Chapter 17

  I’ve decided to devote only a single chapter to the years of Kieran’s incarceration. There were not quite two of them once the sentencing discount and time served had been applied – insultingly short, as Vic and I would continue to argue until we went hoarse. As Kieran went on to reach the age of thirty, forty and beyond – all the milestones Lucas would never see – his sentence would shrink in his memory, in time coming to seem as if it had never happened at all.

  Because of his youth – just nineteen at the time of the trial – his term took place in its entirety in a young offender institute, YOI Danstone in Kent. The Prison Reform Trust document supplied to us made the place sound like a pared-down boarding school, with an emphasis on education and exercise, even socializing.

  ‘It won’t be like that in reality,’ Vic said, and we studied articles about new arrivals being stalked by the threat of violence, about kids having blades smuggled into the facility in the seams of clothing and the drug spice on the pages of books. ‘He might have a psychotic cellmate,’ he added, hopefully.

  But it wasn’t nearly enough to assuage the sense of injustice I felt, the duty to warn other parents of just how cheap their children’s lives were to the courts and how crucial it was to follow those instincts about bad influences in the first place. At first, I could not speak without panicking; with every word, the loss of Lucas would swell until I felt I could no longer breathe. Over time, however, I could manage forty-five minutes or so, long enough to address audiences in libraries and other community spaces. Justin helped me put together a presentation, which began with a photo of Lucas on that holiday in Greece.

  ‘This is my son, Lucas Gordon. He was nineteen years old when he was killed by his friend Kieran Watts…’

  Lock Up Longer evolved from an introduction to a journalist from the Mirror after one of those talks. Roz Engleby’s own daughter had suffered life-changing injuries in a careless driving incident several years ago in which the driver had walked away without punishment. Roz approached me for a short interview and, as we talked, we agreed that something larger and louder was needed to raise awareness.

  A website was created, Twitter account launched. The Mirror’s social media team got momentum going and a PR company represented us pro bono. Now our talks were supplemented with radio interviews and magazine features.

  ‘Lay down the law with your teenagers, because you can’t count on the law to do it for you,’ I exhorted parents in senior school workshops, and both the line and that photo of Lucas were widely published. The campaign took on a life of its own, until one day Vic and I were on the BBC News sofa, our own faces looking back at us from the monitors.

  ‘Ellen, tell us what happened to your son, Lucas,’ the presenter said, her gaze at once theatrical and sincere.

  And for a moment on that brightly lit set, before I could find my voice, my mind went quite blank. Blank and beautiful and painless.

  * * *

  I learned a lot from the Lock Up Longer experience, including the lesson that there are no winners in fatal incidents. For every supporter of tougher sentencing there is a supporter of leniency. Rehabilitation. A second chance. There are the parents of the perpetrator who won’t hear a word against them, partners and friends who insist that a miscarriage of justice has taken place. They suffer abuse, they field accusations, they stand at the far reaches of funerals, crying the same tears as the rest of us.

  I do understand that, I really do.

  Prisca was a case in point. Soon after the television appearance, she arrived at my door to appeal on Kieran’s behalf – or, rather, her own. She was lucky I answered because I’d grown used to the doorbell going constantly and had long stopped bothering with it. (Not that I feared anything hateful, the opposite, in fact: at the height of the campaign, local supporters would leave gifts or flowers, cards containing outpourings of sympathy and love.) But this time, almost absentmindedly, I got to my feet and opened up.

  Her face half-covered by a fleece hat and body enveloped in a huge puffer coat, she was scarcely recognizable as the Prisca I remembered. Her eyes brimmed and her voice, when she spoke, was congested with cold.

  ‘Please don’t do this, Ellen.’

  ‘Do what?’ I said.

  ‘This campaign with the papers. I’ve had hate mail, a brick through my window. Graffiti everywhere. I’m having to stay with a friend, I’m that scared.’

  Rumours of this nature had already reached me through friends. ‘It’s nothing personal towards you,’ I said, in a neutral tone. Public speaking and media experience had equipped me with a steadiness I could draw on when ambushed like this. A loss of emotional control only obscured the message. ‘It’s the principle.’

  ‘The principle of locking up boys?’ she fired back.

  ‘Kieran is not a boy, he’s an adult. And taking another person’s life is the same whether you’re young or old. No one should be allowed to get away with it.’

  ‘He isn’t getting away with it,’ she protested. ‘He’s in that terrible place. I’ve visited him there and I can tell you he’s as miserable as can be. They’re fighting all the time, there’s gangs, a boy in the next cell was beaten in his sleep—’

  ‘But he’ll be out before you know it,’ I cut in, coldly. ‘Time flies, right?’

  ‘Not when every day is hell!’

  I narrowed my gaze. ‘I’m afraid we might have different definitions of hell, Prisca.’

  And here we were, two minutes in, me occupying the moral high ground that no one else could access. Prisca took out a tissue to blow her nose and the sight of her ungloved hands, red and dry with cold, caused a stab of remorse for the way I’d treated her. After Lucas’s death, she’d sent a card in which she shared a memory of him helping her fix a leak in her garden shed, ‘where the boys used to hole up’. She would never have thought to ban Lucas from her house as I had Kieran from mine. She would not have tallied his faults the way I did Kieran’s; she would not have called for their headteacher to expel him. Had the outcomes been reversed, she would not have blamed Lucas for surviving.

  I remembered her presence at the funeral; I hadn’t spoken to her. And here I was now, not even inviting her in, when she was obviously suffering with a heavy cold.

  What was wrong with me?

  As she regarded me with despairing pink-rimmed eyes, I gave a mental shake of the head, righting my brain. This woman was legally and morally responsible for the monster who killed my son.

  I stepped towards her. ‘I’m glad you’re here, actually. I wanted to ask you something.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said, warily.

  ‘Those visits you’ve had with him, has he said anything new about what happened? On the night of the crash, I mean. I know the trauma affected his memory of the impact itself…’ – I managed to say this without derision – ‘…but does he remember how he came to lose control of the car? He’d never had an accident before, had he?’ I remembered the tight spiral of the car park Kieran had navigated with ease; the drive to Dover before he was even qualified, illegal but without incident; and the plan to drive a van for a living. ‘It wasn’t a mechanical failure, so to veer so suddenly like that, at such a steep angle, it was never explained.’

  Prisca looked puzzled. ‘The turning was tight and it was dark and raining. He lost concentration and misjudged it. That’s what they all said, the police and the lawyers, didn’t they?’

  ‘They guessed it. But they never dug that deep, did they? They were happy with the lesser charge, the guilty plea. But I think you know more than we were ever told.’

  She stared at me, open-mouthed. Her breath clouded in front of her.

  ‘Come on, Prisca, he must have told you something new?’ I paused, a choking sensation in my throat. ‘What was the last thing Lucas said? We don’t even know that.’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry.’ Her eyes grew teary. ‘Kieran hasn’t said anything.’

  I k
new as well as she did that even if she had been party to incriminatory details either omitted in court or confessed since, she was hardly going to share them with a woman who’d just been on national television to whip up condemnation of him. But I had to ask. I had to keep on asking.

  She shuffled back, drawing her collar to her throat with one hand and adjusting the strap of her bag with the other. ‘Don’t do this to yourself, Ellen. You deserve peace, not all this torture. This hate.’

  I watched as she walked towards a silver Kia parked a few doors down. I went on watching until the car pulled away, stalking her words through my mind, seeking the smallest dropped clue but finding none.

  ‘You know nothing about torture and hate,’ I said aloud, though I had no hope of being heard.

  * * *

  Our work with the Mirror was important but, by its nature, limited. Crime rolled on, injustices happened every day, and the time came when a new case caught Roz Engleby’s imagination. It was a dangerous driving offence in Liverpool in which a fifteen-year-old girl was killed when her boyfriend of less than a week attempted to impress her with a ride in his brother’s sports car. The passenger side crumpled on impact with a lamp post, ending the girl’s life at a stroke, while the driver walked away with only a fractured collarbone and a suspended sentence.

  I wrote to the victim’s parents to express my condolences and as I positioned the stamp in the corner of the envelope, I felt a sense of symbolism deep within me. It was time to move my activism from the centre of my vision to the periphery.

  Not my thoughts of Kieran, however. Just a month after Vic and I attended our last event, we had word that Kieran had been transferred to a wing at YOI Danstone that offered a special programme of group psychotherapy and ‘enhanced educational opportunity’. Even the food was better in this special unit: some celebrity chef, who’d recently been cautioned after a brawl in one of his kitchens, wanted to ‘give something back’ and had created an experimental menu for the participating inmates.

  This was beyond the pale. I rang the family liaison officer who’d been our contact during the original prosecution to ask if we could influence the move in any way.

  ‘As far as I know, the programme isn’t oversubscribed and it’s certainly not a soft option,’ the officer explained. ‘He’s there voluntarily and that’s considered progress. It’s solid evidence that he wants to understand his own actions.’

  ‘How can he understand them when he claims not to remember them?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe this will help him remember. It’s a clear sign that he wants to try.’

  I closed my eyes as she spoke of the undeniable results. Those who took part in the programme resettled better on release and were less likely to reoffend – and the rest of it.

  ‘He’s even doing some advanced IT course sponsored by a City bank,’ I ranted to Justin later. ‘Anyone would think he’d won a prize, not been jailed for killing someone! I’m going to put something on the website, see if we can get this reversed somehow.’ Though no longer featured in the Mirror or represented by their PR, the Lock Up Longer website remained active and I still fielded regular media enquiries. Vic, when he had time, moderated the discussion forum.

  ‘We need to focus on Freya,’ Justin told me, gently. He said everything gently during that period. As if the human voices, when raised, had the power to inflict bodily injury. To break us.

  I know some of you will be wondering why on earth this lovely, reasonable man stayed with me, but I suppose love makes us do extraordinary things – and not always the bad kind.

  * * *

  It’s probably going to sound strange, but my father’s death helped. It helped in that way self-harm is said to distract from the larger torment, to localize it, even, briefly, to cleanse.

  Believe it or not, I didn’t blame Kieran for indirectly causing it – this wasn’t a case of collateral damage. If anything, the court proceedings and subsequent campaign had galvanized Dad. It was simply the natural order reasserting itself, with all its wistfulness and sorrow. He was in his early eighties by then, had never recovered from his hip surgery, and a second operation had led to an infection he couldn’t fight.

  I travelled down to Kent several times to help Mum sort through his clothes and personal things, decide what to donate and what to keep. Freya came with me on those visits. Even at the time, I was grateful that she had reacted to her brother’s death and all the media activity by withdrawing. She was fourteen by then and could so easily have broken out, broken bad, punished the world by punishing herself. And I knew her grief was complicated by the fact that she’d liked Kieran – they all had, that was the truth of it. To know that her mother was focusing all her energy on his destruction – well, it must have been hard and I’m sorry for that.

  When I remember that time now, I think of us driving down the M20, Freya in the passenger seat, choosing playlists from her phone for us to listen to. Sometimes a song would come on and she’d say, ‘Lucas really liked this one,’ and I’d ask her to repeat the name of the artist, as if by committing it to memory I’d be closer to him, though in truth, every minute lived, every mile driven, took us further from him.

  Most of Dad’s estate went to Mum, of course, but I found I had been left a lump sum of twenty thousand pounds. Though I had an idea I might donate it to a cause that honoured Lucas’s memory, a homeless charity, perhaps, I took no immediate action. The delay would prove fortuitous – from my perspective, at any rate.

  Chapter 18

  ‘I don’t understand, Ellen. How can this be true?’

  The moment I play Vic the audio, he capitulates. I take no pleasure in the collapse of his facial muscles, the deathly pall that inches across his face – or the part of it not covered by the black and silver needles of his stubble. It doesn’t help that whoever designed the lighting in the lobby of the chain hotel in Euston we’re meeting in had the aesthetic of the interrogation chamber on her mood board.

  Vic’s just had a go-see with someone interested in trialling his lager in their new vending machine but, for now, the brewer in him is silenced. ‘Let me hear it again,’ he says.

  I oblige. The line about cow’s milk and brownies is hard to isolate from the hiss of the coffee machine, but the clip from outside the café is devastatingly clear. ‘Keep away from me,’ Kieran warns, his voice deep with malice.

  ‘Did you hear that bit just before?’ I say. ‘ “Who are you?” As if he didn’t do time for killing my son!’

  Vic is looking at me with a mix of apology and respect that I’d find satisfying if the cause were just about anything other than this. As I told him on the phone, I don’t want to be right. ‘I can’t believe you were face to face with him, Ellen. I honestly don’t know how I’d have reacted. I’d probably have decked him.’

  ‘It was weird,’ I admit. ‘I didn’t handle it very well. I sort of froze.’

  ‘Can you forward this recording to me?’

  ‘I’m not sure you want it on your phone. This is a pay-as-you-go I bought specially for this stuff. Maybe you need to get a burner as well, Vic.’

  As I speak, I have a sharp sense of history repeating. I had a secret pre-paid phone once before, eventually disposing of it – along with the old iPad I’d been using to make all kinds of dodgy searches – in Regent’s Canal on my way to an appointment in Little Venice. A young DJ’s half-a-million-pound refurb and one of my first clients (‘I want all my lights to be like meteors,’ he explained).

  ‘What d’you mean, “stuff”?’ Vic says, warily. ‘What else have you got? Photos?’

  ‘Only these through the glass doors.’ I find the images for him. ‘But you can’t recognize him from them.’

  He studies them, frowning deeply. ‘Has he bleached his hair?’

  ‘Yes, he’s done something funny to his lips and eyebrows, as well. It’s definitely him, though. No doubt about it.’

  ‘You don’t have to convince me. I’d know that voice anywhere.’


  ‘His new name is Sam Harding,’ I say, and as Vic’s gaze narrows, I give a half-smile. ‘You think he was inspired by me?’

  ‘Would he know that was your name before you got married?’

  ‘He might. I remember us all talking one night on holiday about whether women of their gen would take their husbands’ names.’ I falter as a vivid image arrives: teenagers with pink-streaked limbs and hair stiff with salt from the sea. Eruptions of laughter. Lucas at the centre of it all, raucous and vital. ‘They might have mentioned that when they got back. Anyway, I’m his number one enemy, always have been. I wouldn’t put it past him to have compiled some sort of dossier on me.’

  ‘Where does the Sam bit come from?’ Vic asks.

  ‘He probably just chose something you can google and get lost in a million alternatives. But once you add the address, it’s a lot easier.’

  Which explains why it took me less than an hour to discover how ‘Sam Harding’ comes to be living the life of Riley. ‘He designed an app called Moodsmart. It hasn’t launched yet, from what I can tell, but the bastard struck gold and sold it to that big tech company, Saurus.’ I summarize what I know about the app. It has interactive functions that allow the user to dial up or down according to their mood or the occasion. (Set Your Own Mood, the brand urges. Be Kind to Yourself.) ‘He was backed by this trendy team of investors, let me find the website for you…’

  If I’m right, the grey-haired man I fled from down Mill Street is James Ratcliffe, an angel investor specializing in ethical investment, whose company, Green Shoots, is based in Bermondsey Street, a five-minute walk from Shad Thames. The photo on his company website is dated from at least a decade ago, but it’s the same guy, I’m sure of it. I pull up the image to show Vic. ‘I saw this man when I was there two days ago. He must be the one who helped Kieran do the deal with Saurus. He was in his flat, so they must still be working together or at least be friends. He struck me as very protective.’