by cass green
Irene couldn’t believe, now, that she had managed to get through all these years in such a deluded state. Liam must surely be dead too? What on earth would make him stay away from her for so long?
She thought about crime dramas she had watched on television, where witnesses to crimes had been given new identities. They weren’t allowed to get in touch with their families, were they?
A well of pain inside threatened to take her breath away and then the sharp ring of the doorbell pulled her back to herself. She stood up and smoothed down her skirt before forcing her feet to move towards the front door.
But when she opened it, the person on the doorstep was not who she expected to see at all. For a moment she was confused, thinking this was perhaps a delivery of some kind, but the tall, slim bearded man was familiar to her and with an exhaled, ‘Oh,’ she realized, with disappointment, who it was.
ELLIOTT
For a horrible moment, I thought she was frightened of me, and it struck me, rather belatedly, how this might look, me turning up instead of Anya.
‘Oh,’ she said.
‘Mrs Copeland,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid Anya had to back out of coming because she isn’t well today, so I hope you’ll forgive me for turning up instead. She really wanted me to talk to you. I’m Elliott, her husband.’
Two lies, right there. The first of several I had planned for this strange morning.
I’d made up a reason why I needed the car that day – claiming I wanted to drive to the big DIY superstore in the next town. Anya had a work event and wouldn’t be home early, so I had plenty of time to drive to Cambridge.
I’d never been there before. I think I must have been expecting to see some dreaming spires as I followed the satnav route from the M11, but I was directed around the northern edge of the city, past suburbs that looked much like anywhere else. If I had ever given Cambridge University any thought at all, I pictured the likes of Sebastian Flyte, all cricket jumpers, teddy bears, and lying around on mint-green grass in the sunshine. But because Anya had given it up and gone on to Durham, she spoke about it almost never.
Irene lived in a northern suburb of the city called King’s Hedges, just down the road from a driving range and a couple of tech company premises, in a neat bungalow with hanging baskets outside that looked dry and neglected.
She was staring at me now, chewing her bottom lip. I was conscious of towering over her. I kept well back from the front door and attempted to radiate as much friendliness as I could, in the circumstances.
‘If you like,’ I said, ‘I could maybe buy you a cup of tea or coffee if you want to go to a café?’
She looked at me as though I had made the most ridiculous suggestion she had ever heard before replying. She wore no make-up and her curly, iron-grey hair was short and cut in a no-nonsense style.
‘Why would we pay for tea when I have perfectly good tea inside?’ she said and then beckoned me in.
‘Go on through,’ she said. ‘But I want you to know that my friend Rowan is just next door and she will call the police if she thinks I am in any trouble.’
Her voice shook a little as she said this and it made me feel even worse about what I was doing here.
‘I promise you,’ I said as I went into a living room filled with patterned sofas and smelling of pot-pourri, ‘I wouldn’t dream of causing you any trouble. I just want to talk, that’s all.’
She made a harrumphing sort of noise and then said, ‘Tea?’ in a way that didn’t brook much disagreement.
I thanked her and sat down as instructed.
The stone mantelpiece contained a number of photographs and I got up again and quietly went over to have a look. There were two school photographs of the kind my school no longer went in for, preferring instead to attempt arty shots of pupils in groups. One showed a boy with dark red hair, grinning cutely at the camera with two missing teeth. This was obviously the younger son, the one in the picture with Anya.
The other picture was then surely Michael. His brother had evidently been blessed with all the looks as the picture showed a round-faced boy with ginger hair and small eyes, barely smiling at all.
Other photos showed the boys on beaches or playing in sandpits and smiling at the camera.
A more recent one of Michael made me lean closer for a better look.
He was wearing a suit and shaking the hand of another man. It looked like he was being given some sort of promotion or work-related reward. Still very overweight, he was quite short too. I pictured him thinking he had the right to frighten my wife, and pure revulsion and rage sent me back to the sofa to breathe slowly for a moment or two.
I had to remember I was dealing with a grieving mother here, I told myself. Even if her son had been a nasty piece of work.
Irene came into the room holding a tray of tea things a bit precariously, and I jumped up to help, taking it from her and placing it on the table.
There were two cups, a teapot, a jug of milk, sugar, and a plate of digestive biscuits. I distracted myself from the sick feeling inside me by accepting tea gratefully and setting it down on the mat next to me, which had a picture of a poodle on it.
Irene wasn’t looking at me, but staring down at her own cup, which she was holding in her lap. Evidently, neither of us really knew how to start.
‘Mrs Copeland,’ I began, just as she said, ‘So, Elliott.’
We both gave polite little laughs and it felt as though the atmosphere had thawed the tiniest bit.
‘You go first,’ she said.
I paused before speaking.
‘Can I just say before anything else, that I am so deeply sorry about your son?’
She gave a tight little nod and then looked up at me, her eyes blurry now.
‘I just want to understand, you see,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I said, nodding with as much sympathy as I could. ‘I want to tell you, on Anya’s behalf, what happened.’
I began to speak, reeling out the carefully constructed story I had been working on since I received the letter.
She didn’t interrupt, merely stared at me as I spoke with a set expression on her face, ignoring the teacup cooling in her lap.
I told her that Anya had briefly gone out with her other son while she was a student, but when they broke up, Michael had wanted to go out with her and wouldn’t accept her gentle rebuffs. Her face tightened at this and she lifted the cup to her lips, then seemed to change her mind, lowering it again with a slightly shaking hand.
I told her what Anya had told me, that Michael had tracked her down and been harassing her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to say. Each word against her son seemed to strike her, so I began to wonder whether this was immensely cruel of me to be doing this.
But she had to know. And she had to be misdirected from the way it ended.
‘… I think,’ I said, ‘and I’m so so sorry to have to say these difficult things to you, that when Michael finally began to accept that Anya has her own life – has me – and that she was never really interested in him … I think that was what led him to take his own life.’
She stared at me, her lip trembling, and she hurriedly put her cup and saucer onto the table with a clatter and pulled out a tissue.
‘But where is Liam then?’ she said, voice shaking. ‘Where did he go?’
I opened and closed my mouth uselessly for a second before I found my words.
‘I don’t know, Mrs Copeland. I don’t know and neither does Anya. She was just a casual girlfriend of his but she—’ I bit off the end of the sentence. How much pain could I pile on this poor woman? But she noticed, leaning forwards in her seat.
‘What?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’
‘This isn’t easy to say.’
She slammed her hand against her knee with such force that I flinched. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘do you not think I’ve had time to already think the worst? It has been fifteen years!’
Breathing heavily now, she closed h
er eyes for a moment and then levelled them on me, calmer now.
‘Right,’ I said hurriedly, ‘right, of course.’ I swallowed. This was one of the strangest conversations I’d ever had. The smell of lavender seemed to be filling my nose now and the patterned walls were closing in. I wanted to get out of here.
‘Well, I don’t know if you were aware that Liam had been …’ God, this was hard to say to her face ‘… been supplying drugs to students at the university?’
Evidently, she wasn’t. Her face sort of crumpled and she pulled a man-sized tissue from a box under the coffee table and buried her face in it.
‘Mrs Copeland?’ I said. ‘Are you alright?’ I contemplated getting up and putting an arm around her before thinking about how inappropriate that would be.
But it was horrible to see her distress. I wished I could have told her the whole truth now, about how Michael had been trying to hurt Anya and how he had fallen to his death. That had to stay secret though. Better, surely, to think her son had been depressed, than that he had been potentially a rapist, or worse?
After a few moments, she blew her nose with real delicacy and waved a hand at me. ‘Go on then,’ she said.
‘And,’ I took a breath, ‘Anya thinks he knew some quite bad people and that it’s possible he got into trouble in some way after they split up.’
‘Trouble?’ said Irene in a voice that was bubbly with tears. ‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Well … I mean, if he owed them money or something, and he couldn’t pay it back.’ Then, in a rush, I said once again, ‘I’m so sorry to have to say all these difficult things.’
She nodded briskly, eyes tightly shut, then said, ‘Does your wife know any names for these people?’
The slight hope on her face now was hard to look at so, coward that I am, I glanced down at my lap.
‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m afraid not. She didn’t really …’
‘… didn’t generally mix in those sorts of circles,’ she said quietly. ‘Of course not.’
There was a deep silence then, and the ticking of a clock in the hallway seemed to crash in my ears. I picked up my teacup and forced down the cold drink. It seemed rude to leave it there when she had gone to all that trouble.
Irene nodded and muttered, ‘Right, well, okay,’ and then got up, walking over to a sideboard that was filled with various figurines and trinkets, including a glass bell that said ‘World’s Best Mum’.
She came back brandishing a faded news cutting, which she handed to me.
‘Does this mean anything to you?’ she said. ‘I wanted to show it your wife but she didn’t exactly give me the chance.’
Puzzled, I took the piece of paper from her and studied what it said.
TRAIN DEATH AT WATERBEACH
15th August 2003
A woman struck by a train at Waterbeach Station on Friday night has been identified as Alice Adebayo, 48, a midwife and mother of two. Mrs Adebayo died at the scene from her injuries. She leaves behind a husband, Ekow, 51, and two teenage boys, Kojo and Xoese. Friends and well-wishers have paid tribute, laying flowers and cards at the entrance to the station concourse. She had worked at The Rosie Hospital since it opened in 1983 and was described by colleague Helen Mills, a Senior Consultant in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, as ‘one of the most positive, warm people I have ever met. She touched the lives of the people she worked with and every patient was treated with the utmost professionalism, care and devotion. We at The Rosie are absolutely devastated to lose her.’
I looked up at Irene, who was standing over me.
‘We used to live right by that station,’ she said, ‘I remembered when it happened. Terrible tragedy it was. But I don’t understand why my son had this cutting in his possession.’
‘I’m really sorry,’ I said, with a frown. ‘This has nothing to do with us.’
I tried to hand it back and she thrust it towards me again.
‘Just ask her,’ she said, a steely note in her voice that was new to me.
I found myself taking the cutting and putting it into my pocket.
Who was this Alice Adebayo woman? What did she have to do with Anya? And, presumably, with Michael or Liam?
Irene sighed deeply and sat down heavily on the sofa.
I glanced up at the photos on the mantelpiece again; at her two lost sons. She didn’t seem like the kind of mother you would want to abandon so cruelly. The chances were that Liam was dead too. Then there was Michael: overweight, unappealing Michael who had become fixated on beautiful Anya and, when he couldn’t have her, brought about his own death.
Because he did. The detail of what had happened on that cliff didn’t really matter now. At least this old lady could try to move on with her life a bit.
‘Elliott,’ she said now, her voice very quiet.
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t know you and I don’t know your wife … this Anastasia, or Anya as you call her. I didn’t get a very good impression of her, I’m afraid to say, but I suppose now I have to accept that it may have been a shock, me turning up like that. Especially if my son had been …’ she visibly swallowed ‘… been bothering her. But you seem like a nice young man.’ She paused again. ‘Do you honestly think that my son killed himself?’
I looked her directly in the eye.
‘Yes, Irene,’ I said softly. ‘I’m so sorry.’
She closed her eyes for several moments.
Nausea was rippling inside me now. The pot-pourri smell seemed overpowering and it was yanking me back-back-back. I lowered my head to look at the floor, trying to turn off the memories of being twelve, in Mrs Mack’s neat front room, on the cusp of doing the worst thing I have ever done. I’d betrayed one old lady and now I was doing the same thing to another. I had to get out of here.
But despite all those bad feelings pumping through me, despite all my guilt, my work there that afternoon wasn’t quite done. Because, staring down at the floor, I noticed something just under the coffee table near my shoe.
The originals of the photo-booth pictures that we had received in the post.
Irene was still gathering herself, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. I did it before I could talk myself out of it; pretended to reach down to scratch my ankle and enclosed the worn rectangle of paper in my fist. I kept it in my palm and then slipped it into my pocket.
We said awkward goodbyes at the front door. I wished her luck and told her again how sorry I was. She did something strange then. She reached up and touched my cheek, gently.
‘I think you’re a kind man,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t easy for you to come here. Thank you.’
As the front door closed I began to run. I managed to get round the corner before throwing up all over the pavement, watched by an elderly man in a flat cap who was mowing his lawn.
ELLIOTT
On the M11 I had to force myself over into the slow lane after a lorry driver suddenly seemed to come from nowhere, blaring his horn at me and sending adrenaline through me like hot acid.
Shaking, I made myself focus on the road ahead, as rain began to fall. Soon the conditions were terrible, with spray bouncing off the lorries and causing a lethal mist that made me cling to the tail-lights of the car in front that glowed like hot coals.
There really had been something of Mrs Mack about Irene Copeland. Maybe it was the grey curls and the glasses, or the look over the top of them that seemed to go through to your soul.
The final part of that terrible story began to play out in my mind again, just as it did on a semi-regular basis, usually when I couldn’t sleep.
Kieran hadn’t hung about.
I’d dragged myself into school the next morning with my first bad hangover.
It had been a rough night, coming home in the state I’d been in, and Mum frantic with worry. We’d rowed – I couldn’t even remember the content of it the next morning when I woke with a splitting headache, and a pool of sick on my bed. I had to throw the pillow away in a bin round the back of the f
lats, before Mum handed me a bucket of cleaning products, her face grim.
I remember glancing at Mrs Mack’s closed front door that morning and convincing myself that everything would be okay. No harm done.
Mum ranted as I cleaned up, about how living in this place was sending me in a bad direction, and how inconsiderate people were in general. I was only half listening and didn’t pay any special attention to her saying Mrs Mack’s television had been unusually loud the night before. This was something she did sometimes, when she claimed certain people on television ‘mumbled’. It didn’t register with me at all, then, only later.
When I came home from school the following evening, after playing football, the world was stained with flashing blue lights.
I watched, along with the rest of the floor, as the stretcher was carried out of the flat, Mrs Mack looking smaller than she ever had as queen of her kitchen, baking up a storm.
She survived only until the next morning, when her heart gave out completely.
If she had only let them take it. But that wasn’t Mrs Mack’s way. So they tied her to a chair and tortured her until she told them where she had hidden the box.
It was because of me that she had moved it, you see. She knew that I had stolen from her and this is something I think about often. About how let down she must have felt, as though her day had already got as bad as it would be. But the real horror was still to come.
They held lit cigarettes against her papery skin, and beat her with the flex of her iron. Coronation Street and The Bill on top volume hid the sounds of her pain and distress. Her terror.
I didn’t go and tell the police about my own likely role in what had happened. I was too scared and sick, especially after seeing Jason the next morning and him giving me a sly smile before quietly miming a cut-throat gesture.
They were caught, anyway. Too stupid and high not to try and fence her other belongings locally. Both men got life imprisonment for murder.
They may have held those burning tips against her fragile skin and whipped her until they broke her, but they couldn’t have done it without my help.
