The Alibi Girl

by C. J. Skuse

  ‘Oh, sorry, am I not allowed to have a bad day today? Is it my turn tomorrow?’

  ‘Foy, for god’s sake.’

  I take a deep breath and lean on the table, hand on my mouth. It’s all in my throat. It’s all in my eyes. ‘Sorry.’

  I know I’m being selfish. Life’s chewed Paddy up and spat him out, minus two legs, and he just smiles and carries on. Why can’t I be grateful? I have two brothers alive and healthy, two beautiful nieces and a nephew, I live in one of the most stunning regions in France. We have money, not much but enough. And it’s a sunny day. Why can’t I focus on all that rather than the gnawing pain inside me every minute?

  Because I’m me, and he’s him. And that’s how it is.

  ‘You don’t have to apologise,’ he says. ‘Talk to me.’ I shake my head. ‘If you can’t talk to me… what about Isaac?’

  ‘What’s there to say? You both know.’

  ‘I don’t know what it’s like to lose a husband,’ he says.

  ‘It’s a bit like losing two babies, really. Or a bit like losing Mum and Dad only a pinch more painful. Okay?’

  He blows out his cheeks and sips his drink. ‘So what are you feeling today?’

  ‘Oh, we’re gonna do this here, are we? A public counselling session in an art gallery café? Don’t tell that artist with the beard. He’ll probably want to film it for his next installation. A Study in Desperation. Starring Foy Vallette and Paddy Keeton.’

  ‘It shouldn’t have happened. He should be here.’

  ‘Yeah, he should. But he’s not. And do you know what Isaac said to me yesterday? “It’s been eighteen months, Foy.” Like there’s a time limit. Eighteen months, right, that’s it. You can stop grieving now. You can stop missing him. You can stop feeling that pain every time you take a shower because his razor and shower gel are still there on the shelf, waiting for him. You can remove his coat from the banister now. You can take his shoes to the brocante because he’s not going to wear them anymore, is he? It’s so obvious.’ And now I’m crying. ‘It’s pathetic.’

  ‘It’s not pathetic,’ he says. I push my crumby plate away. ‘Have you thought anymore about planting a tree for him in the garden?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘We can scatter him near the trees we planted for Mum and Dad?’

  I shake my head again. ‘I’m not ready, Paddy. I know it’s stupid but while he’s in the urn it’s like he’s still there, in the house.’

  He puts his hand on top of mine. ‘He’s not though, is he?’ He cries with me. ‘He’s not there anymore, sis. I’m not going to mention it again. But I want you to know that when you’re ready, we’ll do it, all of us. We’ll all be there with you.’

  I nod. It’s the only thing I can do.

  I feel a little better after letting off steam, and afterwards we go round the rest of the gallery and I don’t make any more comments, though I’m filled up with them and I know Paddy is waiting for me to say something about the gun firing turds and the stack of broken pencils. But I don’t feel the need now. I just want to go home.

  When we get back, Isaac’s still up the ladder fixing the light in the salon.

  ‘Oh my god are you still doing that?’ I say, tripping over a mound of dust sheets that he’s left by the door.

  ‘Yeah, bloody rose keeps coming down. How did you two get on?’

  I look around for signs of Paddy but I can hear his voice echoing off the kitchen units, talking to Lysette and Isaac’s husband, Joe. ‘Crap,’ I mouth. ‘But he enjoyed it.’

  ‘Oh, there’s a guy keeps phoning for you. Left his number in the hallway.’

  ‘Who’s that? If it’s that sodding stonemason again, I’ll tell him to take a running jump off the chip on his shoulder.’

  But the note, which I can barely read, says Kaden Cotterill. Call urgently. And a number. ‘Who’s Kaden Cotterill?’ I call out but Isaac doesn’t answer. Joe comes out of the kitchen with two mugs of coffee.

  ‘Hey, Fizzle. Do you want a brew?’

  ‘Hey, Joe, no thanks. Who’s Kaden Cotterill when he’s at home?’

  ‘No idea.’ Joe disappears into the salon. I pick up the phone and begin dialling the scribbled number. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror – I’ve had chunks of plaster in my curls since Wednesday and there’s still a smidge of lemon paint on my neck. We haven’t painted since Monday.

  The phone picks up on the third ring.

  ‘Yeah, hello, this is Foy Vallette. I have a message to call this number?’

  ‘Miss Vallette, hi, it’s Kaden Cotterill here.’

  ‘It’s Mrs Vallette and I don’t know a Kaden Cotterill, who are you?’

  ‘I work at Middletons, Mrs Vallette.’

  It takes me a while – my head has been so jam-packed with Luc’s death and the house refurb there hasn’t been room for much else. But this is important. This is so important, I made myself forget it was happening in case it didn’t.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I say, a rush a breath invading my body. I grab for the banister and sit down on the bottom stair. ‘Sorry, I wasn’t expecting to hear from anyone. Someone was going to email me at the end of the job, weren’t they?’

  ‘That was the original plan, yes.’

  ‘Have you found her? Have you found Ellis?’

  ‘Yeah. I did find her.’

  Another deep breath. ‘Wow. Gosh, fucking hell. Okay. Where is she?’

  ‘Initially I located her to the Nottingham area and then about a month ago she moved on quickly to Spurrington-on-Sea. It’s in the North West, near Blackpool. She was quite difficult to track down.’

  ‘Well yeah, she’s been in witness protection nearly twenty years, she should have been nigh-on impossible to track down. So what’s happened?’

  ‘Um, well I wanted to talk to you about that and fill you in properly. I located her to a small apartment complex on the seafront. She had been placed in the basement flat and I was able to grab the empty place on the top floor so I could keep a close eye on her. Get you all the information you requested.’

  I feel like I’m swallowing rocks. ‘Why do I get the sense there’s something wrong? Has she moved on again? Tell me that – is she happy and settled?’

  ‘No, I can’t say for sure that she is.’

  This is not the news I wanted. But I’ve handled bad news before. I can handle it again. We can do something about this now we’ve found her. While she’s alive, there’s hope.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘She was mostly frightened. Vulnerable. And now she’s gone.’

  ‘Gone where?’ I notice a bit of the newly laid plaster is bubbling on the staircase wall. I pluck at it with my one remaining nail. The plaster comes off in palm-sized chunks, falling to the floor as dust. Bloody builders.

  ‘I got back to my flat a few minutes ago and there’s a guy here. Think he’s her social worker. He questioned me about her. He said she’s disappeared.’

  ‘Wha—?’

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know any more than that I’m afraid. He did say there was some blood on the carpet.’

  ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘The way the flat’s been left, the questions he was asking me, suggests she left in a hurry. Or she was taken…’

  I can’t breathe.

  ‘One option is that she may have rumbled me. Known I was following her.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The other night, I got back from work and she fainted. And I brought her inside and she had a nosebleed. I went up to my flat and got some peas to put on it and when I came down, she’d gone through my phone. And she’d found pictures that I’d taken of her. The ones I was going to send to you next week with my report.’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘I tried to pass it off initially as a crush. I said I was low-key obsessed with her.’

  ‘So you pretended to be her stalker?’

  ‘Not a stalky kind of stalker. More a quietly lovelorn one. Kind of thing.’

&nb
sp; ‘And it freaked her out?’

  ‘No, she was quite enamoured with the idea. And we kissed. I know it was unprofessional but I had to throw her off the scent. It was a mistake, I realise that. But then the night before last, I was teaching her some self-defence cos she was worried about being attacked and I told her I didn’t want to start anything. She took it badly.’

  ‘Why was she worried about being attacked?’

  ‘I assumed she had a violent ex who was looking for her and her baby.’

  ‘She’s got a baby?’

  ‘That’s another weird thing. I’ve been inside her apartment and the baby’s there. But it’s not a baby. It’s a doll.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She’d been pretending it was a baby. It’s one of those reborn things you can order online. She was pretending.’

  ‘Oh my god, what’s happened to her?’ I say it more to myself than him.

  ‘I’ve got photos, interactions, everything you asked for…’

  ‘But you haven’t got her, have you?’ I say, with thinly veiled fury. ‘Some bloody private detective you are. Mr Magoo would have done a better job.’

  ‘I’m not her bodyguard. You asked Middletons to get photos, a sense of her daily movements, a picture of her life. That’s all you wanted.’

  ‘I asked you to keep an eye on her and get me a full picture of her life. I wanted to know she was happy and settled.’

  ‘Well, you can make your own mind up about that. But in my view, no, she’s not happy. Or settled. Woman’s a freak.’

  ‘Don’t you dare call her that.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. I apologise.’

  ‘Oh whoopee fucking shit,’ I cry. ‘What am I meant to do with an apology, Mr Cotterill? Maybe that can be my cousin instead? Maybe that will do, eh?’

  ‘I don’t know what else to say.’

  ‘You knew she was vulnerable. You knew she was in hiding and afraid. Why didn’t you… why weren’t you… ugh, Jesus Christ.’

  ‘I don’t think she’s been kidnapped. The flat’s not exactly hidden away. It’s right on the seafront. Somebody would have seen or heard something.’

  ‘Why didn’t you see or hear something? That’s what I’m paying you for, you bloody idiot.’ The hardness in my throat gives way to tears. I wipe my cheeks roughly with my palm. ‘I’m coming over. I can’t sit around here doing nothing.’

  ‘Alright, well, I’m gonna head back to London then.’

  ‘What? You’re going back to London now?’

  ‘There’s nobody here to watch anymore, Mrs Vallette. If Ellis is not here, then I don’t need to be here either. This is a job.’

  ‘Do you still want paying?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Do. You. Still. Want. Paying?’ I spit.

  ‘You’ve already paid me.’

  ‘Via cheque, and it’s post-dated.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ‘You fucking watch me. Now you sit tight and I will be there as soon as I can. Send me your location. And you better hope she turns up alive in the meantime or I swear on all that’s holy, there’ll be blood on your carpet.’

  Third day of the Christmas holidays, eighteen years ago…

  17

  I’m in the castle treehouse with Ellis, my little legs swinging out over the rope ladder in the doorway. Ellis is stirring the Stone Soup for dinner.

  ‘Did you feed the mongooses?’ she asks me.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What is a mongoose?’

  ‘A bird I think,’ I say. ‘We better go and get some more penguin steaks for the polar bears later, before the shops shut.’

  I sneak another Jelly Tot from the packet we’re saving for after tea. Ellis sneaks one too.

  ‘Is your dad alright?’ I ask her.

  She stops stirring the soup. ‘Yeah. Why?’

  ‘I saw him crying this morning. My dad was crying too. Last time I saw them crying was at Grandad’s funeral.’

  ‘My dad cries all the time,’ says Ellis. ‘He cried at that RSPCA advert on telly the other day. And when that woman won the speedboat on Family Fortunes.’

  ‘My dad doesn’t at all,’ I say. ‘I told Mum but she just said he’d been peeling onions. He hadn’t though cos we’ve got fish pie for tea and there’s no onions in that.’

  ‘Let’s not worry about it,’ says Ellis. ‘I’m dishing the soup now. Sit at the table.’

  And I do. And we pretend-slurp together. Then we wash up together, I dry the plates and put them in the box cupboard. Then we eat the rest of the Jelly Tots.

  ‘I’m thirsty,’ says Ellis.

  ‘Shall I go and get us some more cans?’ I pick up both our Rios from the shelf and shake them – both empty.

  ‘We won’t be allowed anymore. Chelle said we could only have one a day.’

  ‘She won’t know. The pub’s shut now, they’ll have gone upstairs for the afternoon. I’ll get us a couple more.’

  I race across the beer garden and through the back door and bomb through the kitchen and along the passageway into the bar, but though I’m expecting to see the place in near darkness, except for the daylight coming in through the diamond-shaped leaded windows, the lights in the main bar are all still on. The jukebox is playing. Voices. I duck down behind the beer pumps.

  ‘It’ll be alright, sis.’ Uncle Dan and Mum.

  ‘It won’t be alright. It won’t be alright at all. Will it? You have no idea where you’re going. And what about Ellis?’

  The music stops and clicks over to another song. A harmonica. It gets louder. ‘Come on. Dance with me.’

  ‘No,’ Mum sniffs. ‘I’m doing this.’ She’s cleaning ashtrays at the tables. I don’t know where Dad is. Maybe he went upstairs already.

  ‘Come on, come here,’ Uncle Dan says. ‘Please. Dance with me.’

  I hear the longest sniff. Mum’s crying. The song is called ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’. I have no idea what that means but it seems to upset Mum no end. I peek out and see them, holding each other, moving in a circle in the middle of the bar. He’s stroking her hair. She’s just holding onto him. He’s holding onto her.

  ‘There has to be another way. You have to talk to the police again.’

  ‘It’s me or them, Chelle. That’s what they said.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose you. Either of you. I can’t.’

  ‘Let’s just dance, sis. Come on.’

  I peek out again, and they’re dancing. He’s in his red Bristol City shirt, she’s in her blue flower dress. They’re both crying with their eyes closed. What on earth is going on? I can’t ask, Mum will shout at me for sneaking around. She did that time I snuck in to borrow her perfume to make our marvellous medicine, and her and Dad were in bed. I hear the jukebox click to silence. Another click. And the same harmonica sounds.

  ‘Let’s play it again, come on,’ Uncle Dan sniffs.

  ‘Song’s not long enough,’ says Mum, and when I look they’ve stopped dancing. They’re still and hugging.

  I carefully grab the two cans of Rio from the bottom shelf, and move two back ones forward so Mum doesn’t know they’re missing, and duck down underneath the counter, racing back out to the beer garden. I tuck one can in each pocket of my hoody and climb the ladder. Ellis is drawing when I get up there.

  ‘Here you go,’ I say, placing the cans on our welcome mat. ‘Ooh, I need a wee.’

  ‘Okay.’

  I race back inside and up the stairs, two at a time (nearly) like Isaac does. Dad’s playing PlayStation in Paddy’s room. I sprint up the corridor to Isaac’s room and I don’t even knock.

  He’s sitting beside the front window under the net curtain looking quite bridal, taking sneaky drags from a cigarette. When I burst in, he jumps about a foot in the air, flinging the cigarette outside and wafting the air in front of his face.

  ‘Fuck, I thought you were Dad,’ he gasps, making out he was about to have a heart attack. ‘Bloody kno
ck, Foy! I’ve told you before.’

  ‘Mum and Uncle Dan are crying and hugging in the bar,’ I blurt, all breathless.

  ‘What?’

  I repeat: ‘Mum and Uncle Dan are crying and hugging in the bar.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘And they put a song on the jukebox twice. And sort of danced to it except the dancing wasn’t very good and they were sort of crying and turning in a circle.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So why are they doing that? The last time I saw Uncle Dan cry it was at Grandad’s funeral but that was ages ago. They wouldn’t still be upset about that, would they?’

  ‘Nah, course not,’ he says, going back underneath his white veil and lighting up another cigarette. ‘Keep an eye on the door for me.’

  ‘So what’s going on?’ I ask him, imploringly, as he smokes his cigarette and seems to have no cares in the universe.

  ‘I dunno, do I? Ask Pads.’

  ‘He’s playing PlayStation with Dad.’

  ‘Where’s Ellis?’ asks Isaac.

  ‘In the castle. Should I go and get her?’

  ‘No.’ He stubs out his cigarette on the windowsill, closes the window and picks up a small white bottle which he squirts into his mouth. Then he wipes his hands on a wet wipe and grabs a pack of Juicy Fruit from his desk. ‘Listen, you’re not allowed to tell Ellis this, alright? Uncle Dan doesn’t want her worrying about it.’

  ‘Worrying about what?’

  ‘I heard him and Mum and Dad talking the other night and he’s in a shit ton of trouble. Like proper police trouble.’

  ‘Oh my god. Why?’

  ‘Dunno, I only caught some of the conversation. But the police were going to send him to jail. Serious, serious jail. For, like, years.’

  ‘Oh my god.’

  ‘I didn’t hear all of it. They had the telly turned up too loud. But he might have to go away for a bit.’

  ‘To jail?’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe somewhere else. You know like when they used to send prisoners away to other countries instead of prison? Like Australia and that?’

  ‘Is he going to Australia then?’

  ‘Don’t say anything to Ellis, alright?’ He puts the cigarette packet back inside a small wooden box which our grandma brought him back from Egypt to ‘keep his key rings in’ and peels back the corner of the carpet behind his desk. Then he crouches down and lifts two of the floorboards, posting the box underneath. In seconds, the carpet’s back in place, the room smells of spiced apple and cinnamon room spray and the cigarettes, lighter and breath spray have all magically disappeared.