by Elle Croft
Arms found their way around her shoulders and squeezed tightly, like they were stemming the flow of blood from an open wound. But it was useless. She knew that nothing could stop her from falling apart. She let the arms hold her, though, as she screamed and cried and raged.
‘Immy,’ Kat said after a while, tugging her away from her brother’s body. ‘Immy, we have to go.’
‘NO!’
She shrugged Kat off, and clung even more tightly to Brad’s body, twisting her arms around him as though he would know, from wherever it was that he had gone, that she was not going to let him go that easily, that she wouldn’t leave him. Not again.
‘Baby,’ Kat whispered in her ear, ‘we need to go. Your sister, I think she’s in shock. I know you don’t want to leave, but think about Jemima, OK? Do it for her?’
Jemima. Of course.
Her mind struggled through the cloud of her pain to find clarity. She tried to cling to the facts: Brad was gone. She didn’t know where their older sister was. She couldn’t live with her real parents. The only place she had left was Kat and Dylan’s house, the place she’d called home until less than a week ago. She’d failed Brad. She’d let him down, let her fear get the best of her. If she’d acted faster, stopped deliberating and just done what he’d asked her to, they’d be gone. Jemima never would have done what she’d done.
But she had done it. Jemima had taken the knife from her hands and plunged it into Brad’s back. Imogen knew that, ultimately, his death was her own fault. And now the only place she had left to go was the very place she’d tried to escape.
Rage bubbled up as she thought about what Jemima had done. Staring at the handle of the knife, now lying on the concrete, she imagined herself grabbing it, spinning around and hurling herself at Jemima, taking revenge for what she’d done. But just as quickly as the thought arrived, she dismissed it. She wasn’t going to hurt Jemima. She couldn’t. It wasn’t who she was.
With tears coursing down her cheeks, she nodded.
‘Let’s go,’ she whispered.
She felt herself being lifted from the ground, carried like a child away from her brother, away from all of that blood, away from the shed where she had lost herself forever.
Jemima reached up and took her sister’s hand, which was limp and sticky. Imogen didn’t have the strength to tear her hand away. She couldn’t do anything, couldn’t feel anything.
The three of them left the shed and walked around the side of the little shack that had, in such a short time, become her home. As they passed the living room window, Imogen caught a glimpse of the awful floral sofa and that stupid pram that Brad never explained to her, and she realised, with a fresh wave of grief, that she would never know. She would never have all of the answers.
Kat was whispering in her ear, and then there was noise, and light; so much light. Voices. Shouts. It was too much, she thought. And then she slipped into unconsciousness, held in the arms of the woman who raised her; Kat’s once again.
Chapter 60
KAT
‘Thank God,’ Dylan says, dropping to his knees as I approach him in the floodlit space beyond Brad’s house. His face is streaked with tears, his arms flung out as though he’s surrendering.
Someone, I don’t see who, takes Imogen from my arms, tries to get me to follow them, but I fall on my knees onto the dirt beside my husband, and I let him hold me while I say, over and over again, for my own reassurance as much as for his, ‘Imogen is OK. She’s OK. Imogen is OK.’
‘I know, my love,’ he says, taking my face gently in his hands and tipping it up so I’m looking directly into his eyes. ‘I know. She’s safe. You’re all safe. It’s over.’
I stare at him until my breathing becomes steady again, but then my eyes flicker left and right.
‘Imogen … where …?’
He senses the panic in my voice, the same fear pressing against my ribs as that very first day when Imogen went missing. Brad’s gone, I know that. But logic doesn’t stop the fear from rising once more. I can’t see my daughter. Can’t be certain she’s OK.
‘There,’ Dylan points to my left, where two police officers are wrapping Imogen in a blanket and offering her water to drink. Jemima is standing next to her sister, still gripping her hand. My shoulders drop.
We stay like that, collapsed in the ochre dust, our girls safely with the police, until more sirens and lights fill the air around us. An ambulance has arrived. It must have been called as soon as we stepped out of the house. Dylan carries me to the van as it pulls off to the side, beside the fleet of police cars, their bright white headlights all pointed towards the house. Our daughters are just ahead of us, their hair gleaming red and blue in the lights, their hands still linked.
Officers stormed into the property as we walked out. They must have found Brad by now. I shudder at the memory of the scene we just left behind, at what they’ve had to walk into.
As I take a seat in the back of the ambulance, opposite Imogen and Jemima, I let myself be examined by the medics, who talk to me in calm, gentle voices that do nothing to quiet the panic that’s started building inside me. I’m not worried about Imogen’s safety. She’s being taken care of now. But they’re going to want to know what happened. They’re going to want to know how Brad died, who drove the knife so deeply into his back, through his ribs, into his vital organs. They can’t know the truth. They can’t. Jemima saved us. She brought our family back together again. She can’t be punished for it. I try to speak, try to make sure that the girls understand, but all that comes out is an incomprehensible mumble.
‘Concussion,’ a medic says to Dylan.
I try to protest, to stand, but Dylan puts a hand firmly on my knee.
‘Just try to relax,’ he says. ‘It’s over. Just rest now, and don’t worry about anything, OK? The girls are fine. Everything is going to be all right.’
He keeps talking, a stream of reassurances I can’t hear for the deafening anxiety that’s clamouring inside me. I want to argue, to make him understand that nothing’s OK, that this nightmare isn’t over yet, but I’m so weak, so tired, and my muscles won’t work anyway, and then I drift, and the voices and faces blur, and I try to fight it but in the end, my body’s fight is stronger, and I sense myself slipping, submerging into the darkness all over again.
Chapter 61
KAT
My eyelids flutter open and I close them tightly again, a defence mechanism against the harsh white light that burns at the back of my eyeballs. It’s blinding. I’m lying down, although I have no idea where I am. I try wiggling my fingers. They brush against fabric; not soft, but comforting anyway. The air smells clean. I try again, squinting against the light, opening my eyes slowly, slowly, until they adjust.
As the scene comes into focus, the sounds of a beeping monitor and the gentle squeak of shoes in the hallway come into focus. And the wheeze of my own laboured breathing. I’m in a hospital.
I lift a hand to my head, and my fingers touch some kind of dressing. I wince.
‘You’re awake,’ Dylan’s voice announces.
I turn my head slowly and his face fills my vision. He’s beaming.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ he says back, and in that tiny word there is an entire ecosystem of loss and relief and fear and hope.
‘The girls—’
‘They’re both OK,’ he replies, taking my hand. ‘They’re just down the hall, two rooms next to one another. Jemima is being treated for shock, and Imogen needed a bit of extra help to flush out whatever was in her system and get some nutrients back in her, but they’re going to be completely fine.’
I sigh, relieved, until the scene in the shed comes flooding back to me, not blurred and distorted, but with a crushing clarity that leaves me breathless.
‘Are you OK?’ Dylan asks, looking around for someone who can help me. ‘I’ll get a nurse.’
‘No,’ I say, my voice raspy. ‘I’m OK, I’m just remembering it all. How did you …?’
‘How did I know where you were?’ he asks. I nod. ‘Jemima called. She woke up in the car, alone, and didn’t know where you were. She was scared, but she spotted your phone in the front and she called me. The signal was terrible, she kept dropping out, but she eventually managed to send me a pin to her location. I was at the police headquarters, so we raced over there straight away.’
‘But how did you know …?’
‘What, that you were in trouble?’ Dylan laughs. ‘I do know you, you know. And I know you wouldn’t have pulled Jems out of bed in the middle of the night unless it was really important. And unless you really didn’t want me to know.’
I try to smile, but it doesn’t work.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. And I mean it. ‘I should have just told you. I was so scared, he told me not to tell anyone, and I didn’t know what he might do …’
‘It’s OK. We’re all OK.’
I close my eyes and breathe in. Then out. Trying to steady my nerves, trying to still the turmoil inside.
‘Is Brad …?’
‘Yes, he’s dead,’ Dylan says, his voice dull. ‘The police need to ask you about that, actually. They said they’ll come back when you’re awake. They’ve spoken with Imogen already.’
I try to sit up, but the movement causes fireworks behind my eyes. I moan and collapse into the pillow again.
‘What did she say?’ I ask weakly, my eyes squeezed closed as though that will stop the hammering inside my skull.
‘The truth … presumably.’
His words hang over us, a challenge. I don’t dare to open my eyes, don’t allow myself to show him my fear. Because, just like the moment in that shed when the knife blade was pointed at my chest and my life was in my daughter’s hands, I need to trust her.
I almost laugh at the version of myself who, only a week ago, didn’t trust Imogen when the worst thing she’d been involved in was some stupid fight at school. We’ve come a long way since then. I’ve had to trust her with my life. And now I have to trust her with her sister’s. Our family depends on it. It depends on her.
Only I’m not sure which her I’m talking about. Is it Imogen we’ll be taking home with us … or Amy?
Chapter 62
IMOGEN
‘I know this is hard,’ the policeman said gently.
Imogen tried not to look him in the eye; she couldn’t cope with his pity, or that sympathetic head-tilt everyone seemed to be doing. If she acknowledged his sympathy, it might cause a tiny crack in her facade, burst her wide open, expose all of her to the world. To herself.
It had only been a few hours, so she’d had to think quickly. She knew that they were going to ask her what happened in that shed, and she knew that her answers would change the future. For her, for Jemima. For everyone. The balance of power was weighted heavily on her – was all on her, really. She didn’t want that kind of pressure, didn’t trust herself with big decisions, especially not now, not after she’d cost Brad his life.
Since Kat had carried her out of the shed, covered in blood, and empty inside, she hadn’t spoken a word. What could she possibly say, now that Brad was dead and Jemima had killed him?
She’d gone around and around in circles in her mind, trying to decide how to carry on, desperately hoping to make sense of it all, but she still didn’t know what she’d say when they asked. And now they were asking.
She was lying in an uncomfortable single bed, covered in stiff white sheets, in her own hospital room. The nurses had explained that she couldn’t go home yet. Apparently she was in shock, and there were substances in her bloodstream that needed to be flushed out before they could let her go. At the back of her mind, Imogen knew what that meant, what they weren’t really telling her about the last week of her life, but she wasn’t ready to face it. She couldn’t cope with that, too. Not just yet.
In the meantime, the cops were here, and they wanted to hear, in her words, what had happened.
‘I know this is hard,’ the policeman repeated, looking down at his notepad. ‘But we need you to tell us what happened. We need to hear it from your point of view. From the start.’
She’d rather just forget, block it out, never have to think about it again, but as soon as a sliver of memory appeared in the gaps of the walls she was trying to put up, the truth enveloped her, and emotions formed like a hurricane, building force, gathering intensity, in the back of her throat. She swallowed them down.
She let out a long, slow breath. She closed her eyes tightly and opened them again. And then, without planning her words, she took another deep breath, and let her instincts take over.
‘The start?’ she began. ‘Well, Brad got in touch with me on Facebook one day, out of the blue. I didn’t know who he was, and I’d never heard of him before, but he told me that I might want to consider getting a DNA test.’ She swallowed. ‘I ignored him at first, just thought it was spam, or some creep trying to get hold of me. But I don’t know, I guess I’d always felt like a bit of an outsider, like I didn’t belong. I was so different. I just … Well, anyway, I guess his words just ate away at me for a few weeks, so one day I ordered the DNA test.’
‘We found Brad’s messages,’ the officer said, surprising her. Those messages had been private. What else did they know about her that she’d rather keep hidden? ‘We noticed that after a while, your communication with Brad on Facebook stopped. Can you tell us how you kept in touch with each other after that?’
‘I … He sent me a phone,’ she admitted. ‘Just an old lame one, like, it didn’t actually do anything except send texts and make calls. It arrived one day after he’d stopped replying to my messages and I told Kat the parcel was something for school. She didn’t suspect anything.’
‘What happened to that phone?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly, trying to remember the night they had met. He told her she’d thrown her phone out the window of his car. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘OK,’ the cops exchanged a look. ‘That’s OK. Can you tell us about the night you ran away? Why did you decide to meet with Brad then?’
‘I got the DNA test results,’ she began, closing her eyes to bring the events of that evening into clarity. Her fingers curled into fists as she remembered how betrayed she’d felt, how her anger had been so intense that she’d thought she might explode. ‘Brad was the only person I could talk to about it,’ she continued. ‘So I messaged him, and I told him what the test results said, that I was adopted. And then he messaged me back and told me he’d come and get me, that he’d look after me.’
She paused. The policeman who had been asking her questions was scribbling notes in a little notepad that was balanced on his knee. The other cop, an older guy, friendly looking, was nodding at her, smiling warmly.
‘So you arranged to meet?’ the scribbling cop asked.
She nodded. ‘Yeah. Brad said that I should sneak out the house and meet him down on Jetty Road. It’s not far from home, and it’s usually busy enough that no one would pay too much attention to me.’
‘Were you planning to run away, to stay with him, or did you intend to come home again?’
‘I didn’t … I hadn’t thought about it,’ she admitted sheepishly. ‘I was just so angry with Kat and Dylan, so I wanted to get away, I didn’t want to see them or speak to them. I just wanted to speak to Brad, to find out how he knew about me being adopted. I wanted answers.’
‘So you met him on Jetty Road?’
Imogen nodded. ‘Yeah. I climbed out my window and jumped the fence to go over the neighbours’ backyards for a block or so. And then I ran to Jetty Road and waited where Brad said, outside the hairdresser’s, in the little alleyway bit. He pulled up just after I arrived—’
‘How did you know what he looked like?’ the older policeman interrupted.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied. ‘He told me to look out for an old Nissan Pulsar, white, with a blue stripe down the side.’
‘OK,’ the young policeman said, his
words slicing through her memories. ‘So what happened then?’
‘I got in the car, and he drove me somewhere. To the house.’
‘Did you know where you were?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I got really sick when we got to his house, so I can’t really remember a lot from when I met him. Just from when I started getting better …’
A mass of emotion bloomed in her chest. Those few days had been filled with so much hope, and love, and security. Things she thought she might never feel again.
‘Did you try to leave?’
She frowned. ‘Why would I have wanted to leave? He was taking care of me.’
‘OK,’ the policeman said gently. ‘That’s OK. So what happened at the house?’
‘Not much.’ She shrugged. ‘I was in bed for most of it, but when I was up and about, we sat and talked.’
‘Did Brad mention what his plans were? You weren’t going to stay there forever, were you?’
‘He didn’t say,’ she replied, exhausted suddenly. She wasn’t sure what they expected her to say, what they thought had happened over the past week. There was nothing to tell them, no big secret. She was with her brother. They had been spending time together, getting to know one another. It was as simple and as wonderful as that. ‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘And I don’t know anything that’s going to help you. Please can I go to sleep now?’
‘We won’t keep you for much longer, Imogen,’ the older policeman assured her. ‘But it’s important that we find out what happened last night when your mum – when Kat – came to the house. Do you know how she found out where Brad was keeping you?’
‘He wasn’t keeping me,’ she snapped, angry. ‘I wasn’t kidnapped.’
‘Right,’ the young policeman said, his hands up. ‘But do you know how Kat found out where you were staying?’
