by Tim Weaver
‘So, anyway,’ Patrick continued, ‘Zaid reckons that trying to keep himself out of the spotlight never helped very much when it came to staying in touch with the people he went to university with – but he also said that he felt Beatrix’s disappearance had begun to damage the friendships they all had, even before that.’
‘In what way?’
‘Basically, I think they were all affected by her going missing in the manner she did. Zaid said she was always the life and soul, the glue that kept them together, and after she vanished – and especially after rumours started spreading that Vale might have had something to do with it – it created tension, resentment and paranoia.’ Patrick paused and I listened to the rain on the roof, my windscreen wipers sloshing back and forth. ‘Zaid reckoned that a few of the guys he did the course with began turning on Vale. They’d refuse to speak to him. Vale would try to engage with them and they’d call him a “rapist” or a “killer”. Zaid says he tried to avoid getting involved, but it was hard because he felt so upset by what had happened to Beatrix, and admitted being seduced by the pack mentality a couple of times. He said part of the reason it got so bad was because, a lot of the time, Vale would just sit there and take it; he’d just let them throw all these accusations at him, point fingers at him, sometimes push him around. Vale was a big guy – six two, seventeen stone – but Zaid said his temperament was the opposite. He looked like someone who’d been bullied for years and was conditioned to it. He was your classic loner.’
Either Patrick or the woman shifted position slightly.
‘So,’ Patrick continued, ‘as I said, after Beatrix went missing, it sounds like it got messy: arguments, anger, a lot of fighting and accusations, and almost all of it was directed at Adrian Vale. The irony is, when Vale turned up dead on that beach in Sussex, Zaid said he read about it in the papers, then spent months feeling like he and the others were responsible. In his suicide note, there’s a line where Vale mentioned being unhappy during his time at uni, so it’s possible Zaid is right. He might not have pushed Vale that day, but all of them on that course – by virtue of how they behaved towards him – probably got Vale to the edge.’
‘Or maybe they didn’t,’ the woman said.
‘Right. Maybe Vale really, genuinely, was responsible for Beatrix going missing, he knew what happened to her afterwards, and he made that jump because he couldn’t live with himself.’
I glanced at the Dictaphone.
Something had changed.
The trajectory of the conversation had altered.
I looked up at the road and then back to the passenger seat, the digital display a faint orange, the numbers slowly ticking over. Now the two of them were talking as if Adrian Vale was actually the man responsible for Beatrix’s disappearance, not simply the man who’d taken the fall for it. I wheeled back in my thoughts to what the woman had said on tape when I’d first switched the Dictaphone on at Seiger and Sten: I hurt her, and then I betrayed her, and then, when it was finally over, I buried her in the deepest hole I could find. It had sounded so much like a confession, so obvious a proclamation of guilt. I’d been so on edge at Seiger and Sten – so conscious of being found there – that at the time I hadn’t even stopped to consider an alternative, even though the fact that Patrick had seemed to go along with it – had even seemed accepting of the crime the woman was saying she’d committed – had always bothered me. But now everything was starting to jar.
‘Are you okay?’
It was Patrick, his voice soft.
And then, slowly, as the silence rolled on, something else faded in, barely there at first, and then louder and louder until it was all I could hear.
Sobbing.
‘I know this is hard,’ Patrick continued, and I heard him move, and then the rustle of clothing as the two of them embraced.
‘I let her go,’ the woman said quietly.
‘You did what you thought was best.’
‘I let her go,’ she repeated, the sentence dulled slightly by her mouth being so close to Patrick. ‘I let her go. I never should have let her go …’
‘Dave and Mira, they were good people. They really loved her.’
‘I know,’ the woman said.
‘She had a happy childhood.’
‘I know she did. I know they were good to her.’ The woman sniffed, coughed a little. ‘But that doesn’t make it better. I still gave her away.’
‘You were fifteen.’
‘She was my baby, Patrick.’
Everything else faded except the voice on the tape.
‘Beatrix was my baby,’ the woman repeated, her words gluey and pained. ‘She was my daughter – and I gave her away.’
Part Six
* * *
THE MOTHER
I can hear a noise.
It’s not what I’ve always assumed is a generator. It’s not in my head either. The first few times, I started to worry that it was – that this was some consequence of my isolation, the start of an illness, except not one that would consume my body, but one that would demolish my mind. That’s something that has troubled me since the very first moment I woke up here. When all you can see is darkness, when most of your time is spent in complete silence, when scenes from your life, faces you’ve pictured or conversations you’ve replayed aren’t real, but imagined – constructed in the space behind your eyes – sudden noises aren’t a reason to rejoice. They’re a reason to be fearful and to panic.
Because you want them to be real.
You’re just terrified they’re not.
This one, though, is different. It feels different. When I clear my head, when I let the portraits of my family go, of my parents, of friends and people I worked with, of every single face I’m using to try and keep me sane, I can still hear the noise. It’s not some remnant of a memory. It’s real. It’s here, as much a part of this place as this floor and these walls are, as I am. When I move, my muscles stiff, my body doughy from the lack of exercise, I can still hear it. When I eat – and the sound of my eating fills my ears – it doesn’t go away.
I need to find out what it is.
I get on to my feet, arms out in front of me, and shuffle forward into the dark, in the direction of where I think it might be coming from. I don’t know how this place looks in the light, if there was ever light here, but I know there must be doors, even though I can’t find them, and I know it’s fifty-two paces north to south and forty-seven paces west to east. I have no idea what’s actually north, south, east or west, but I know which wall is which, so I give them compass points to help me navigate.
As I keep moving, following the direction of the noise, I can feel the uneven concrete floor beneath my feet. I’ve stopped wearing the shoes I was left: they’re too uncomfortable, my toes too sore from where they didn’t fit and kept rubbing. When the concrete gets too cold at night, and it can become as chilled as an ice rink, I use one of the blankets to wrap my feet up. I have two blankets now: a second was left for me a few days ago. Maybe a week. I didn’t understand why to start with, but then I could feel it: the air, still and stale as it is, is mutating. The temperature’s dropping.
One of my hands – out in front of me – hits the north wall and I realize I’ve allowed my thoughts to wander and lost count of my footsteps. Refocusing, I pause where I am and listen: this is the part of the room closest to where I think the sound is coming from. For a second it seems to stop, but then I press both hands to the wall, and I stand motionless and silent, and I hear it again. It’s less frequent now, more distant, but it’s here. Readjusting, I begin sidestepping to my right, keeping both hands on the wall. The walls are made from wood – oak, I think – huge, heavy slabs of it that stretch up higher than I can reach. I’m pretty tall, but even on tiptoes I can’t feel the right angle where the walls must eventually meet the ceiling. One day, I tried launching one of the shoes into the space above my head, to see how far the room went up: in the centre, the only sound it made was when it landed on the
floor again; at the edges, though, it was different – it hit the top with a brief, dull thump.
That was when I realized the room has a sloped ceiling.
As I think about the design of this place, I think about the man who put me here, who drugged me, picturing him in the final moments before my blackout. It’s hard to remember much after that. I remember being blindfolded, gagged, my ears covered, but whatever he gave me, it messed with my head. My perspective, my reality. I had the vague sense of being carried somewhere, perhaps into the boot of a car or the back of a van – it felt like I was there for hours – except it seemed almost coffin-like, smaller than a boot should have been; certainly smaller than the back of a van. There was maybe the high-pitched hum of a vehicle engine at some point later on, but I’m not certain of that. Over the time I’ve been a prisoner in this room, I’ve started to worry that what I think was the sound of an engine is, in fact, an embellished moment, something that never took place, a recollection added because I’ve been alone for so long, replaying the same memories so often that they’ve distorted and twisted out of shape. But then, at other times, I force myself to stick to what I remember. I tell myself I’m not mistaken. I did hear the drone of an engine. I was in a small, narrow space. And wherever I am, it’s not a town or a city. There’s nowhere in a city where the noise just stops like this. Wherever I was driven to, wherever this place is, it must be way out in the countryside. Somewhere remote.
So I don’t know where I am, I just know who took me.
I know who he is.
But here, alone in this darkness, there’s no one for me to tell.
45
The sun came up just before seven, bleeding out across the horizon, the sky blooming orange, and then pink, and then mauve. I sat at the window, watching it, bone-tired but unable to sleep, and waited for Healy to finish up in the kitchen. Apart from the sound of the kettle boiling, and the occasional moan from the cow sheds, it was quiet.
He limped through, the injuries Isaac Mills had inflicted on him still evident. He’d been awake when I got back, sitting alone in the pre-dawn blackness of the living room, waiting for me to return, and I told him about what I’d heard, and then played him the things that Patrick Perry and the woman had discussed during their meeting in the woman’s car. That was where Patrick must have been going during his walks and why he always went alone. The two of us sat and listened to the tape in silence, to the sobs of Beatrix Steards’s birth mother, her tears, the words she couldn’t express. She’d never been a killer.
She’d just been a parent.
She was the woman who’d brought Beatrix into the world in March 1965, the woman who’d carried her for the nine months before that, and what she’d said to Patrick made perfect sense, because the hole she’d talked about burying Beatrix in had never been a physical one. Instead, the hole was the deepest, remotest part of her. It was a place in which she could try to inter the trauma of giving her baby away.
‘So why would she want to know about Beatrix now?’ Healy asked, half covered by shadows, his knuckles red from trying to fight off Mills. ‘How did she even know Patrick to ask for his help?’
I tapped the top of the Dictaphone. ‘She says why in a second,’ I told him, because I’d heard the next ten minutes in the car before I’d got back to the farm. I’d heard her explain to Patrick the reasons why she needed to know the truth.
The answer to that was coming.
And so was something even bigger.
I continued to hear the same words being spoken for a second time – ‘She was my baby, my daughter, and I gave her away’ – and then the woman said, ‘Sorry. What a state I must look …’ I heard her sniff, clear her throat; imagined her getting herself together, trying to collect her thoughts. Eventually, she started speaking again, and though her words were soft, they were warm: ‘I would never have thought of Beatrix for a name. It’s actually lovely. I’m glad they called her that.’
‘What did you want to call her?’
‘Sophie.’
‘That’s pretty too.’
‘It had been my grandmother’s name. After the birth, after I held her in my arms, I looked at her and thought, “Sophie”. It suited her so well.’
‘What did your boyfriend think?’
‘Not much, really. Simon Lenderith, his name was. We were both teenagers. The moment he found out I was pregnant, he basically abandoned us, so I did the whole thing on my own. Well, me and my mum. My dad didn’t speak to me for five months after I told him I was going to have a baby.’ She made a sound: a short laugh, bereft of any humour. ‘A teenage girl getting pregnant: that gets frowned upon even now, so imagine what it was like back then. But, you know, Dad was just a product of his time … I didn’t blame him.’
‘What about this Lenderith guy?’ Healy asked me. ‘Is he relevant?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘I tried looking him up just now, and the only Simon Lenderith I could find, who’s about the right age, died back in October 2011.’
‘I always dreamed she would come and find me.’
The woman had started talking again.
‘Beatrix?’
‘Yes. When she was eighteen, I prayed that she would want answers, that we could sit down together and I could explain everything. I just wanted the chance to meet her, even if only once. It was so crazy: it started, quite literally, the moment I gave her away, the idea that I needed to explain why, that I needed to tell her that – despite what I’d done – I loved her. And that obsession with telling her, it would colour everything.’ Her voice had collapsed almost to a whisper, making it harder to hear now, even with the volume up. ‘I was born up here, but because my father was in the air force, we moved down south when I was two years old. So by the time he retired and decided to move us all back up to Yorkshire again, I was seventeen, and do you know what I kept thinking? I kept thinking, “How will Sophie be able to find me in Yorkshire?” I mean, it was a naive, childlike thought, but it would keep me awake at night. I had no idea where she was living, if she was even still in the London area, but that was what I was thinking: “How will she find me if I move counties? How will she find me up here?” In my teens, my twenties, it troubled me so much …’
Healy glanced at me.
I could almost see the gears cranking behind his eyes.
‘I’ve been so lucky in my life otherwise,’ the woman said, still wounded, still distressed, her words cut through with the weight of her history. ‘Well, for the most part. I mean, we all have our battles, don’t we? Life sometimes treats us in a way that isn’t fair. But I live in a beautiful part of the world and have neighbours I adore. I have a wonderful husband who I love. I have two amazing kids. But what I did to Beatrix, it kills me. I try not to show it in front of John, with Ian on Skype, when we visit Rina, but it cuts me so deep. I think sometimes it’s worse than the cancer.’
Healy glanced at me for a second time.
We’d both been wrong.
Because of the southern accent, because these meetings had taken place away from the village, because all the women in Black Gale, except Francesca, were born – and, we’d assumed, raised – up north, we’d thought that this woman was entirely new to us.
But she wasn’t.
She’d been right there all along.
It was Freda Davey.
46
‘Freda,’ Healy said softly, almost to himself.
I remembered the Skype call I’d had with Rina Blake where she’d talked about her mum: how Freda had never placed much importance on a career because she’d just always wanted to be a mother. I remembered what Ross had said right back at the start, about how she could be a mother-hen type. Now it seemed obvious why.
Her southern accent had thrown me when I’d heard it on the tape, had me looking in another direction, away from Black Gale. But, instead, the answer about who the woman was had been at our starting point all along. Patrick’s investigation hadn’t been triggered by a reque
st from a stranger, and it wasn’t an affair with someone mysterious and unknown. It was a friendship built much closer to home.
Literally next door.
‘So now we know who she is,’ Healy said.
I paused the recording and the cottage became quiet.
‘And we know who Beatrix Steards was to her.’
His eyes fell on the Dictaphone again.
‘That just leaves the question of why Freda went looking for Beatrix after all this time.’
I shook my head. ‘We know why.’
‘Do we?’
‘She got cancer again.’
Healy frowned. He looked tired, like me, but he was beaten too, bruised and in pain, and it was stopping him from thinking as clearly as he would normally.
‘From what I’ve been able to find out,’ I said, ‘she went to see her GP in the middle of August and was then back at the hospital in September. She told Rina that doctors reckoned it was early days and the cancer was treatable, which was why she decided to delay treatment for a few months. You remember she told that nurse she wanted to go on holiday?’
‘To Australia.’ Healy nodded. ‘Her dream trip.’
‘Right. It was in the Black Gale file. Thing is, though, I don’t think she ever had any intention of making that trip. That wasn’t why she delayed treatment.’ I tapped out a rhythm on the table, trying to put it all together in my head. ‘Rina said her mum was scared about the idea of more chemo because the first round had been absolutely brutal, so a more likely reason is that she wanted to give herself some extra time to prepare physically and mentally for what was coming.’
