by Ann Troup
Ratcliffe wiped his brow. ‘I wanted to come and tell you myself. It means that certain aspects of the case that would normally have come out in court won’t now be given in evidence. I figured you guys might have questions.’
‘What about Frances, will she go down for her part in things?’ Charlie demanded, teeth gritted.
‘The case against Frances Haines is proceeding as planned. Between you and me, she’s a stony bitch, but she’s not mad. No get out clause for her.’ It was a touchy subject for Charlie, and Ratcliffe knew it. Valerie’s diary had revealed the true circumstances of Patsy’s murder, and Charlie had, rather too late in everyone’s estimation, been exonerated. It had been Frances who had stabbed Patsy, in a fit of jealous rage over Roy, who had been sleeping with both of them but planning to leave with Patsy. Valerie had witnessed the whole thing and had gladly passed the buck to Charlie, who as usual had found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time that day. Ratcliffe felt bizarrely responsible for the failure of the criminal justice system in this instance, finding it difficult to look Charlie in the eye. ‘No comfort I know.’ He mumbled apologetically, sensing the tension in Charlie’s jaw.
‘What about Molly?’ Diana asked gently, steering the subject away, not that there was an easier topic to divert it to.
Ratcliffe glanced quickly at Charlie, relieved to find that he was looking out of the window, avoiding everyone’s gaze. ‘Her remains are ready for release whenever. Just let us know and we’ll make the necessary arrangements with whichever funeral director you choose.’ He could feel Charlie holding in the emotion, how hard must it be for him? Finding out that the woman who raised you had killed your own mother and abducted you. ‘In fact I have something for you, DS Watson managed to track it down, and as it’s not going to court now we thought you might like to have it.’ He pulled out a faded photograph of a young, pretty woman holding a small baby. She was squinting shyly at the camera showing off the child. He held it out towards Charlie. ‘It’s a picture of her, with you.’ He didn’t want to say that they had founded amongst Delia’s smashed belongings, it would feel like rubbing salt into a wound.
Charlie started to reach out for it, but let his arm drop. He knew if he looked at it, he would cry. And if he started crying, he might never stop. Instead, Ratcliffe put it on the coffee table. ‘I’ll leave it with you’.
Amy picked it up, on the back it said in faint pencil, “Molly with Philip 1953”. She stifled a sob. Charlie wasn’t even Charlie now. He was Philip Kerr. Somehow, this small photograph summed up the utter mess they had to sort out, and it pained her deeply. She put it back on the table.
‘We need to discuss the other remains, the baby, Daniel.’ Diana interjected, steering the topic again in difficult waters. ‘We’d like to place him with Molly, it seems symbolic somehow, is that possible?’
Ratcliffe couldn’t see why not and agreed to look into it. He would never say, at this juncture, but he had a sneaking suspicion that Delia had been responsible for Daniels death too, though Julia Ferris was adamant that the child had never drawn breath and had been still born. Valerie’s diary had mentioned Delia’s role as midwife on that occasion, and Ratcliffe wouldn’t have been surprised to find that Delia had stifled the poor mite as he was born, as revenge for the botched abortion Valerie had performed on her. Everything Delia had done had been about revenge, and in Ratcliffe’s book that meant insane actions from a sane mind. It stuck in his throat that it there would be no trial, that she would never be called to account for the lives she had destroyed. Whether her victims were alive or dead. On that note, ‘That brings us to Rachel’ he said cautiously.
‘What about her?’ Charlie demanded, suddenly defensive.
Ratcliffe closed his eyes for a moment. Of all the things that had emerged from this case that had harmed Charlie, what had happened to Rachel seemed to be the thing that had affected him most. ‘I know how difficult this is for you, but we need to discuss what happens next.’
‘Not now.’ Charlie said, through gritted teeth. ‘If you’ve finished, I have something I need to do.’ With that, he stood up, grabbed his van keys and walked out of the house.
Amy shifted uncomfortably, she wasn’t going to apologise for him, but felt embarrassed nonetheless.
Diana, ever the diplomat said gently, ‘I think you’ll have to leave that one for a while. It’s the one aspect of all this that he is truly bitter about. The rest he seems able to live with. But I’m afraid Rachel is a very sore subject.’
Ratcliffe nodded. ‘I understand, but we have to deal with it sooner or later.’
‘I know. I’ll ring you when he’s ready.’
Ratcliffe sighed, stood up and offered her his hand. ‘Thank you for the tea, we’ll be in touch.’ He smiled at Amy and glanced round the pleasant living room, only then did he notice that the photograph of Molly was gone.
Charlie swung the van into the car park and switched off the engine. Checking his watch he realised he still had ten minutes to wait. He picked up the photograph from the dashboard and studied it, staring intently at the tiny face of the baby. Was it really possible that the miniature, scrunched up features were his? He smiled sadly. When he looked at the face of Molly Kerr, he felt the vaguest, softest stirrings of memory, just a whisper of warmth. He’d found out a little more about this woman in recent weeks, Angela Watson had been good at unearthing ancient history, and old memories. In fact, Angela had been quite good at a lot of things lately. He was surprised to find himself liking a detective quite so much. It seemed that Molly had been regarded as a nice kid.
A nice girl from a nice home who had got herself pregnant and hence got herself thrown out of her nice home. She had been young, broke and friendless and had ended up selling herself in order to get by. He wasn’t sure how it made him feel. Amy had asked him if he minded that she had been a prostitute. He didn’t. Better that than a murderess. Delia had killed her for two reasons from what they could gather, one, she was jealous of Molly’s relationship with Barrington Jones, and two she wanted Molly’s child. That was the most difficult aspect of all this, he knew that Delia loved him, in her way she had been a good mother. He dare not think about it too much, too messy by far.
He was so lost in his thoughts that he jumped when the passenger door opened.
‘Sorry didn’t mean to scare you.’
‘I was miles away.’ He said, smiling. He started the engine.
‘You didn’t let on to Ratcliffe you were meeting me did you?’
‘Uh, uh. Not a chance.’
‘Are you sure you want to carry on with this?’ Angela asked, reaching for her seatbelt.
‘Yeah, I’m sure. Enough is enough, time for everything to come out now don’t you think? No more secrets and lies.’
Angela sighed and nodded her assent, ‘OK, let’s go.’ At least now that there wasn’t going to be a trial her over involvement with this would just be a matter of disapproval in certain quarters. Even so, she knew that by embarking on this venture with Charlie Jones she was risking her reputation, and possibly her career. Ratcliffe would not be a happy man if he ever found out what she had been up to.
Charlie began to drive, ‘So tell me, before we get there. I need to know so that I can be prepared. I want to know what kind of reaction to expect.’
Pushing aside her last thread of reluctance, Angela embarked on her story and began to explain to Charlie the pattern of their investigation and how it had culminated in the arrest of his ‘mother’. ‘A lot of this you will already know, so excuse me if I’m repeating stuff, but it helps to tell it in a logical sequence. Valerie and Delia knew each other as kids, Valerie as you know was brought up by her aunt, who was the local abortionist. We can only suppose that Valerie was supposed to take up the mantle at some point. Anyway, we know that there was a botched abortion, which left Delia unable to have children of her own, and the scandal of which alienated her from her family. From what we can gather, they were a pretty brutal family anywa
y, so it’s likely that whatever damage was done to Delia’s psyche was done a long time ago. Of course, she blamed Valerie for her misfortunes, and when she found out that Valerie had married, she approached her and more or less blackmailed her into financially supporting her. According to Valerie’s diary, it was the threat of revealing her past to William Porter that swung it. When William ‘died’, Delia had already been involved in assisting the birth, and likely the death of one child, by then their fates were equally intertwined. Neither would gain anything by betraying the other. They both had enough dirt on each other to bring each other’s worlds crashing down. Of course, Valerie knew you couldn’t possibly be Delia’s child, and Delia knew not only about Valerie’s history but also about William’s incestuous relationship with Stella. They were locked together in it, like a stalemate.’
‘Tell me about the baby, whose was it?’ Charlie asked. ‘And why did they do what they did to it?’
‘According to the diary, he was Valerie’s. It appears that Valerie had the idea of ‘preserving’ the body and hiding it. She wrote about having read something about mummified remains in Sicily, and had applied the process to keep him.’ She noticed Charlie wince at the thought. ‘I know, it’s pretty sick stuff. We think that she was pretty far-gone mentally even at that stage. We know that William had syphilis, and it’s likely he passed it on to her. It’s a disease that can have a profound effect on mental health in the long run apparently. So it might explain some of the more bizarre behaviour she displayed.’
‘Did my moth..., I mean Delia, did she kill the baby?’
‘Honestly, we don’t know. The pathologist thinks not, Ratcliffe has his suspicions and I just have to accept that we will likely never know now.’
Charlie gritted his teeth. ‘OK, so what about Rachel, am I right in thinking that she was the result of incest?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ She waited a moment while he digested the information.
‘So it’s not so much of a mystery why they lied to her about me is it?’ He said bitterly. ‘I don’t suppose they thought there was anything unusual in it by then.’
‘The diary tells us that Delia and Valerie hatched that plan between them, Valerie because she thought it would bring Rachel and her money home, and Delia because she wasn’t prepared to let Rachel take you and Amy away from her.’
‘Given recent, and past events, I don’t get why Delia tolerated my relationship with Rachel at all, why not try and put a stop to it sooner? Why let it go on so long as they were so effective at disposing of people by then.’
This was the part that Angela hadn’t been looking forward to, not that she had been relishing any of it, she took a breath. ‘Because they both knew that Rachel had witnessed what really happened to Patsy, she actually saw the whole thing.’ She paused.
Charlie swung into a side road and stopped the van. ‘What?!’
‘Before you go on’, she interjected rapidly ‘Rachel never hid anything from you, they doped her up with her epilepsy medication, the only bit she could ever recall was seeing you come in after the event. She had no memory of the events before, well no accessible ones anyway. In short, they were terrified of her, that one day she might actually remember what had really happened. They all became very frightened of what Rachel might do, say, or remember. She had the heads up on them all. While she was a child they could discredit her, but as an adult it was much more difficult.’
‘Jesus Christ!’ was all he could say.
‘Like I said, she had no conscious memory of the event itself, only seeing you afterwards.’ As this story had unfolded during the investigation, Angela had often wondered if it was this single happening that had brought Charlie and Rachel together in later years, the two innocents.
Charlie couldn’t process it, not right then anyway. ‘Tell me about William, about the flat and what you found.’ He said changing the subject, but not necessarily into more comfortable territory.
‘William left the day after Rachel was born, he had been in tacit agreement with the arrangement that Delia should dispose of the ‘issue’ as Valerie described it. As it transpired both Frances and Stella closed ranks for once, and as Frances had learned a lot from her mother it seemed that she turned the tables on them over Rachel, and Stella was allowed to keep her. Under the proviso that Rachel was to be known as Valerie’s daughter. William couldn’t take the thought of facing the results of his actions on a daily basis, so he left. I can’t even begin to explain to you why Stella maintained a connection with him. I don’t get it, so don’t ask me to make sense of it. Anyway, it seems the dolls were down to him. Some warped conscience thing we think. Put it this way, I personally never thought that Delia was likely to have a working knowledge of Latin, so it was always likely to be someone else.’
Charlie had known about the thing with the dolls for a while. They had interviewed him about it when Delia had been arrested, shown him shudder worthy and chilling photos of the scene. It had been like looking at the stills from a bad 1980’s horror film. Given Delia’s penchant for collecting dolls, he had assumed it was her who had staged the chamber of horrors, though god knows why. ‘So why did Delia try and burn the place down?’
‘We think she thought the diary might be in there. That’s what she told us anyway’
Charlie nodded. ‘Answer me this. Why would someone with so much to hide, so much shit to cover up, keep a diary?’
Angela shrugged. ‘I have no idea, but she did. I agree that it’s totally odd. The only explanation I can think of was that she wanted it as some kind of insurance policy, that if anything happened to her it would all come out and she wouldn’t be painted as the sole bad guy.’
Charlie pondered that and started up the van again. ‘What was it again, Peccavi peccavisti?’
‘Hmmm. Something like that.’
They didn’t speak for a while, just drove. Eventually Charlie had to ask, just to make sure. ‘How much of this do you think Rachel knew?’
Angela shrugged again, ‘Not much, consciously anyway. Frances is adamant that Rachel knew nothing, never suspected that Stella was her real mother, didn’t know that William existed, though she had seen him several times hanging around the shop. They told her he was an old tramp.’
Charlie nodded as he pulled the van up in the hospital car park. He switched the engine off. ‘So the question is, how much do I tell her? Do I tell her at all?’
Angela turned to look at him. This had aged him, but there was still an appeal about Charlie Jones. ‘I don’t know Charlie. What would you achieve?’
Charlie screwed his eyes shut and shook his head. Rachel had barely survived the attack by Delia, but for some reason she had found the will to live and was now almost well enough to come home. She had come out of the experience a changed person, better in some ways. At least willing to let go of the past and move on. She had asked him to clear the flat, and he had felt as if she were asking him to cut down the bars of her prison. Maybe she was just clinging to him because there was no one else, maybe it was because he had Amy, and it was clear that she very much wanted a relationship with Amy. Whatever, she was back in his life, and it was better than it might have been under the circumstances. Part of him felt that she was owed the truth too, but now he had heard it for himself he had to wonder if the lies were mildly more palatable. He shook his head slowly from side to side.
Angela watched him for a moment. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Course. What?’
‘Do you still love her, or do you just have some warped sense of responsibility towards her?’ Though Angela’s feelings of antipathy towards Rachel had mellowed somewhat in recent weeks, she still had reservations. Frankly, women like Rachel scared her. Too much damage.
Charlie frowned at her and started to climb out of the van. ‘What kind of question is that?’ he said irritably
‘What are you going to do?’ she called scrambling out after him.
‘I’m going to tell her what I think s
he needs to hear.’
‘And which bits do you think she should hear?’Angela asked, suddenly apprehensive.
Charlie paused and slammed the van door. ‘That everything is going to be OK’.
Rachel watched them from the window of her hospital room. Her bag was packed, her medication lay neatly on the bed ready for her to take away, and the jagged scar that ran down her leg throbbed in time with the beating of her heart. There had been a moment where she had contemplated making her escape, but hadn’t been able to think of anywhere to run to. Now Charlie was coming, ready to save her, to take her back to his cosy little house where they would coyly play at happy families. Most of her wasn’t buying it, but there was a tiny stirring of something, the merest flutter of possibility.
About the Author
I was born in Gloucester (UK)and decided that I wanted to become a writer when still at school, where an English teacher marked me 11 out of 10 for a piece of poetry. Consequently, I have been writing for years, and have cupboard full of stories. As it turned out I became a psychiatric nurse instead, which just meant that the stories got a little more twisty and interesting. Now that I am in my forties, and finding middle age a liberating experience, I have decided to publish some of my 'stuff'. I write the kind of books I like to read, rollicking good stories with lots of twists and turns, sometimes preposterous, often humourous and a little dark at times. A good read is chocolate for the soul.
