by R. G. Adams
Matt sat up now, leaning forward and with his eyes fixed on the floor as Annie continued.
‘I have asked myself whether I knew. I suppose I’ll ask myself that for the rest of my life. The truth is that I fought it. It wasn’t hard for me to ignore what Kit had to say, and you certainly encouraged that, didn’t you? All those things you said about her, the young girl with no life experience. I remember you joking, asking who would turn up for work dressed like she was off to hang around McDonald’s with her mates on a Saturday afternoon. I didn’t like her to start with, and you played on it, and in the end, I couldn’t take her seriously. Job done, eh, Matt?’
Kit thought about Chloe again, and Steph and Nicolette, and took in the sight of Matt’s bowed head, committing it to memory so she could enjoy it later. She wanted to see him hurt now, to see him brought down.
‘And do you know, it was unnecessary. I could fool myself quite easily without your help.’ Annie gave a small laugh, and Kit saw a flash of her shame, her contempt for herself and her own stupidity.
‘Even when Kit came here and told me about you touching those girls’ hair, I still wouldn’t believe it. You’ve done that to me, lots of times. But I just blocked it out. Even when Chloe wouldn’t have her hair brushed for weeks on end, just wouldn’t let anyone touch it, I refused to put two and two together.’
Matt got up suddenly and strode across the room. Kit thought he was going to grab his wife so she jumped up too, but Matt had come to a standstill, and taken Annie’s hand.
‘Annie, please, none of this is true. Chloe makes things up all the time, we both know that. We’ve talked about it, haven’t we? How she does it for attention, how she’s jealous of Lucy?’
Annie let him go on holding her hand, but her voice didn’t waver. ‘Yes, we have. That’s because you’re always saying it. Now I think about it, I’m not sure that I’ve ever known Chloe lie, not about anything major. It’s all been you, you saying she made this up, she made that up, we need to be very careful, Annie, she’s really got a problem with fibbing. Bit of a safety net for you if she ever did say anything. Obvious, really. Not very sophisticated, are you?’
Kit remembered her first visit, when Cameron had taunted Chloe about her fibbing. Saying Matt had told him. Another sign that had passed her by.
Matt had dropped Annie’s hand now and he turned to Kit. ‘I’d like you to go,’ he said. ‘This is a conversation we need to have in private. I can assure you it will be sorted out.’
‘She’s going nowhere,’ Annie replied before Kit had the chance to speak. ‘I’m not finished yet. Sit down, Matt.’
He was furious, but he sat and crossed his arms, waiting for Annie to go on.
‘Of course, I was very young when we met. You liked that, didn’t you?’
Matt threw a horrified glance in Kit’s direction. Kit very nearly threw the same back. She hadn’t expected to have to hear this type of thing. But Annie ignored them both. She was staring out of the window now, her face incredulous. Kit could see that she was realising some of this for the first time, that she was speaking her growing understanding out loud as it came to her, second by second. Then she looked at Kit and seemed to decide to change tack. ‘You wouldn’t give up, would you? Standing in my own kitchen, arguing about why we wouldn’t let Lucy learn to sign. Marching into her room, trying to get her to say things. I heard you, you know? I was outside the door. I don’t like you at all, that will be no surprise to you, I’m sure. You’re not even half as clever as you think you are. But I do owe you. They’ll be safe, the children, I can promise you that. I think you might want to make a phone call now?’
Kit nodded, knowing exactly what Annie meant, and she went into the hall and fumbled for her phone. Before she made the call, she paused to listen for a few seconds longer, not wanting to miss the death blow. Annie’s voice came to her through the half-open door.
‘I will have the children and the house and enough money to look after all of us, including all the care that Lucy is used to. The four of us are going to continue to have that nice life you are so proud of. You won’t be working for a long time to come, if ever again, but I am sure your father can cover the financial side for you. I expect him and Jackie to pay through the nose for me and the children for the rest of our lives, so make that clear, won’t you?’
Kit heard a response to that from Matt, quick and angry. She couldn’t catch it, but she heard every word of Annie’s crisp reply.
‘I don’t think you are quite understanding me. Whatever the police do or don’t do, this is the end of it. You are cornered now, one way or another. We can have it all out in the divorce court if you like. Your sexual habits, things you liked, things you would say. I’m sure I’d see some things I’d recognise if I had those transcripts, wouldn’t I? I don’t mind telling it all, I’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Those other two cases might be opened again now too, and, even if they aren’t, I’m about to make sure the police speak to Chloe. You’re caught now, and you will pay, Matt. You will pay for what you did to my little girl.’
Kit opened the front door and went out to make her call and then she waited for Beth Mackay to turn up, which she did after just twenty minutes, Dai Davies in tow and casting concerned looks at Kit’s face, which she realised must be showing signs of her lack of sleep. She sat on the Coopers’ garden wall and attempted to pull herself together. After a while, Dai put his head out of the front door and gestured for Kit to join him.
‘Can you have a word with Mrs Cooper? I think it’s more of a job for a lady.’ He pointed down the hall towards the kitchen.
Kit went in and found Annie sitting at the table. Her face was in her hands and she was sobbing. Kit sat next to her, not knowing what to do. After a while, when she had not subsided, Kit put her hand on Annie’s back and she raised her face. It was a mess of tears and running mascara. She looked at Kit, and when she spoke, her voice was shaking.
‘It’s disgusting . . . my girls . . . I should have known. He’s my husband. I didn’t know, I should have but I didn’t know . . . I can’t stop thinking about it, what he did.’
Annie started to retch then, and Kit jumped up and hauled her to her feet and half pushed her to the sink where she leant her head down and threw up violently, over and over again, releasing an odour that told Kit that she had had to steel herself with alcohol before she could confront her husband. Annie straightened then and reached for the kitchen roll. She wiped her mouth and then she pulled her handbag out of the corner of the worktop. She produced a compact mirror and started to tidy her face. She was still trembling.
A noise came from the hallway and Kit looked up to see Matt moving towards the front door, with Beth Mackay behind him, her hand hovering close to the small of his back, ready to usher him out. He stopped when he reached the door and turned, and Beth stood aside slightly, allowing him a last glance back into his home. He looked into the kitchen and Kit was aware of Annie straightening herself up and looking back at him.
‘Goodbye, Matt. Tell your parents to get their chequebook out. And don’t ever try to contact me or my children again.’
*
When Kit got home it was mid-afternoon. She got straight into the shower, images of Matt Cooper running around in her head. She felt filthy and creeped out, seeing a monster now where she had seen a quite beautiful man. She’d spent the morning speaking to the police and then she’d had to go over the whole thing again at length with Cole Jackson and Clare Donald, after she’d rung Ricky to tell him the story and he had marched into Cole’s office in a flaming temper demanding Kit should be reinstated at once.
Clare Donald had not made it easy for her, still shuffling three pieces of paper about in a display of her extreme reluctance to let Kit off the hook. In the end, Cole Jackson had turned to face her.
‘Clare,’ he had said, his irritation finally bubbling over. ‘It really doesn’t matter whe
ther Kit did some things that strictly speaking she shouldn’t have. She was right, and we were wrong. I don’t imagine Matt Cooper’s going to be pursuing his complaint now, do you? So let’s just drop it. Now, send Georgia up, would you?’
Once Clare Donald had left and Georgia had arrived, with her nasty mouth glued shut, Cole Jackson had turned to Kit.
‘We both owe you an apology, Kit. I’m going to have to tell you not to go out on a limb like that again, but we can let it pass this time.’ He had put his hand up to stop Georgia from interrupting. ‘Please go home now and take a few days off to recover. You can resume your duties next week.’
Kit had agreed readily and left, but not before she had secured a promise from Cole that Lucy’s case would be reallocated from Jean Collins to a new social worker who would look into every possible type of assisted communication for her. Once that was done, she made tracks, not missing the opportunity to irritate Georgia with a smile on the way past.
After her shower, Kit got herself a Coke and a bar of chocolate and sat on the sofa, but she couldn’t settle. Now that she’d done what she could about Matt Cooper, she finally had some space in her mind to think about Tyler. She couldn’t avoid it anymore, and besides, there were things sticking up in her mind and catching at her thoughts, and she needed to flatten them. Maybe she could do it one point at a time, like she had with the Cooper case.
She reached for her bag and rooted around for a pen and her notebook. Then she wrote a list of the things she didn’t understand. The first was Micky Winter’s death notice – why had it asked for donations to the youth centre after it had been burnt down? She sipped her Coke and thought about this, before picking up her phone and googling Sandbeach youth centre. When her search returned an address, she put it into Maps, picked up her denim jacket and her fags and went to her car.
Fifteen minutes later Kit drew up in front of a single-storey grey building set high above the bay. She exited her car and walked around to the front, where she spotted a brass plate. It had been badly vandalised, battered and scratched and covered in a sticky grey-white substance she’d rather not think too much about. But she could just make out that the building had been officially opened by someone in January 2006.
So the youth centre had been rebuilt in a different spot three years after Danny had burnt it down. It was that simple. Kit laughed at herself. She was definitely getting paranoid. She’d been away in 2006 and so had Tyler, so neither of them had known the centre had been rebuilt. It was no great mystery after all.
Relieved to have ticked one item off her list, Kit looked around and saw that, on the opposite side of the road, there was a small park set into the hill. She crossed over and climbed the steep path through the park towards a bench at the top. The sparse lawn of the park was littered with rubbish and the bins were overflowing. There was a small playground halfway up, with a broken roundabout and a couple of tatty swings, the paint peeling from their frames. But she could see there ought to be a decent view of the bay from the top, and she wanted to get a look at that while she pondered the remaining items on her list. As she reached the bench, she saw a silver plate set into its back. A memorial, dedicating the bench to Micky Winter, in honour of his work for the young people of Sandbeach. It made her feel angry and shivery. For a minute she didn’t want to sit on it, but she told herself that she was being stupid, sat down, and leant forward to get her breath back.
After a few seconds her chest eased and she lifted her head, staring down at the youth centre. In her mind, a shadow sat over the whole thing about Tyler and Micky Winter. Something she couldn’t understand or just couldn’t see. She pulled her list out of her pocket and looked at the next item: Why youth centre? It still didn’t make sense to her that Winter had told Tyler to meet him at the centre that night. She’d drawn a line to connect this with the next item on the list: People at house. This made no sense either. It wasn’t the explanation for Winter’s choice of location, she felt sure of it. Even if there had been people back and forth to Winter’s house, as Tyler had said there were, why would that stop him? Surely, he would have just locked the front door and that would be that? There had to be another reason why Winter had wanted Tyler in the centre that particular night. The night he was forewarned Tyler would be coming alone. No crazy Danny to protect him.
She let her eyes rest on the view of the bay and, as she did so, realised she recognised the view. A single-storey building, sitting high up over Sandbeach with the bay behind it. She knew instantly where she had seen that view before – in Len and Jackie Cooper’s hallway, in the newspaper cutting she thought had shown Len opening his residential home. That was why she’d thought the residential home was in a totally different place to where it actually was. The building Len Cooper was opening in the picture was the new youth centre. She felt there was a connection here, but the pieces were too far apart – she couldn’t pull them together yet. Then she thought again about the room in the old Sandbeach youth centre, with the potted plants and the chairs and the mirror on the wall. She’d thought the details were trivial when Tyler had told her, that it was sad to hear how the trauma had fixed them in his mind, but that they hadn’t mattered in themselves. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She got up and headed back down the hill and over the road, pushing open the glass door and walking into the reception of the youth centre.
A pretty pink-haired young woman sat behind the reception desk, yawning and fiddling with her phone.
‘Hi. Can I help you?’ She dragged her eyes away from the screen with considerable effort.
‘Yeah. I’m a social worker.’ Kit showed her badge. ‘I was just wondering what facilities you’ve got. I was hoping to bring some of my teenagers up here, get them doing some activities maybe.’
‘No problem. What are they into?’
‘The usual, I guess. Could I take a look around?’
‘Sure. Help yourself.’ Her eyes flew back to her phone at once.
Kit wandered through the centre, glancing into rooms as she went, passing a gym, some changing rooms and a big room with a climbing wall in it. The place was deserted. In a corridor towards the back of the building she passed a row of doors with glass panels. She saw they were offices and that this was where the staff were hanging out, so she passed them quickly. At the far end of the corridor, just past the staff kitchen, were two doors without glass panels. One was unmarked and the other one had a sign that showed it was the counselling room. She felt a dart of adrenaline pulsing in her chest as she pushed it open a crack to check the room was empty.
She walked into a room which she saw at once was pretty similar to the one that Tyler had described: two armchairs facing one another with a coffee table in between them. The room was done out in muted greys and pinks and it felt bare and stuffy, as if it wasn’t much used. Kit sat on one of the pink chairs and looked around. Her eye was caught by a ridge that ran just below eye level along the wall opposite her. She got up and crossed the room and ran her hand over it, following it across the wall and then upwards at a right angle. She could see that the ridge traced a large rectangle. It was the outer edge of a panel of MDF, which had been attached to the wall and then painted the same colour as the rest of the room. Something had been blocked out. She leant her forehead against the panel and breathed in through her mouth a few times, fighting back the bitter taste in her mouth as the picture finally started to come together in a nauseating rush.
A voice came from behind her. ‘Are you OK?’
Kit looked around to find the pink-haired woman standing in the doorway with a steaming mug of coffee. ‘Yes, sorry, just felt a bit faint for a minute. It’s the heat, I think.’
‘Oh, OK.’ She turned to go, having already lost interest.
‘I was just wondering – what’s your name, by the way?’
‘Amy.’
‘I’m Kit. Sorry to be nosey, Amy, but I was just wondering what th
is is?’ Kit tapped the rectangle of wood.
Amy turned reluctantly. ‘Oh, that. They used to do family therapy in here.’
‘So this was . . .’
‘The one-way mirror, yeah. They blocked it up when the council pulled the funding. Not appropriate for our role, apparently.’
‘Did you have a therapy room at the old centre, too?’
‘Yeah, we did, pretty much the same as this one.’ She turned and hurried back up the corridor before Kit could bother her with anything else.
Kit made her way out into the corridor after Amy. She pushed open the door to the unlabelled room. It was the viewing room, the other side of the one-way mirror, where professionals would gather to observe a family in therapy and to direct the therapist via a telephone. Kit recalled that this particular humiliating experience had been inflicted on the Goddard family once, with predictably explosive results. The room was small and dark and obviously now used for storage; boxes of files and packs of printer paper were piled up against the walls. Kit stood and stared at the rectangle of wood covering this side of the mirror; she thought about Tyler in a replica of this therapy suite and her skin crawled as the final piece of the puzzle clicked into place and she realised why Winter had wanted him in there. It had been nothing to do with privacy at all. In fact, it had been quite the opposite.
Kit closed the door and made her way back to the reception, where she found Amy sipping coffee and studying her Insta. Kit thought quickly as she approached her. She was going to need some proof, just enough to get the police to take an interest, and she didn’t have a shred as yet. She leant on the reception desk.
‘So, Amy, some of my kids aren’t that sporty . . . What about making films? Could they do some live streaming maybe? They’re all big into YouTube. Do you do any of that here?’
‘Not really. Our last manager was into it. But after Micky died it never got going again.’
