by Sarah Hilary
‘Subterranea,’ Marnie repeated. ‘Like the bunkers on Blackthorn Road.’
‘Like that, yeah.’ Adam pushed the heel of his hand at his right eye.
How long since he’d slept? He looked dead on his feet.
‘You’re saying Merrick is breaking the law?’
‘No. He’s too slippery for that. He’s just got a gift for exploiting paranoia.’
‘Tell me about Scott and Christina Brand. Clancy’s parents.’
‘Rich, scared, controlling.’ Adam shifted the length of his legs under the table. ‘They were going to be the stars of my story. Guess I can kiss goodbye to that now.’
‘How do they know Terry Doyle?’
‘Through Merrick. Doyle’s a gardener, isn’t he? He does landscaping for Merrick. He sorted out the garden for Scott and Chrissie after their panic room was finished.’
‘And Clancy. Why’s he living with Terry and Beth instead of with Scott and Chrissie?’
‘You’ve seen Doyle. He’s a do-gooder. Clancy ran away from home, more than once. His parents are control freaks, and he was out of control. He’d have ended up on the streets if it wasn’t for Doyle.’
‘The Doyles told me they’re fostering Clancy. You told me more or less the same thing, gave me a lecture about Social Services not knowing their arse from their elbow. What was that, misdirection? To keep me wide of your real story?’
‘If you’re asking whether I lied to the police,’ Adam looked at the tape recorder, ‘the answer’s no. I don’t have the full facts of the arrangement. Most of it’s guesswork. Hunches, you ever get those?’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘I told you to look into Clancy. I gave you that.’
‘You told me he was excluded from school for touching small children. Was that guesswork too? Or was it a lie?’
Adam put his hands in his pockets, legs at full stretch, spine low in the chair. His eyes were diamond-bright. ‘It was a story doing the rounds. I told you I follow stories. It’s what I do.’ Something wasn’t right with his gaze, the studied way he was slouching.
He was holding something back. Something big.
He leaned forward under the light, showing her the shadows in his stare. ‘The point is this, Detective Inspector. Clancy Brand is an evil little shit who’s taken two small children fuck-knows-where and on your watch. Because you chose to think that all the warnings I gave you were me pissing about for the fun of it.’
‘You haven’t given me any evidence, at any point. You’ve given me guesswork and hunches and smoke because you’re protecting your story, whatever it is.’
‘Trying to help.’ He looked away from her, a muscle twitching in his cheek. ‘I really was.’
‘You got it wrong, in any case. About Clancy, probably. Definitely about the Doyles. They’re not who you think they are. For starters, they lied to the police …’
‘What about Stephen Keele?’ Adam said softly. ‘Am I wrong about him?’
Her heart thumped in her chest. ‘What?’
‘Stephen Keele. The kid who killed your mum and dad. His parents were preppers. You think it was a coincidence, me going after this story?’
‘You …’
His mouth hardened. ‘No coincidence. I knew what I was doing.’
‘This … was about Stephen?’ She couldn’t believe it.
‘I wanted to help.’ Adam looked at her. Something was wrong with his eyes; they were too dark, too hot. ‘I wanted to give you peace because I know what it’s like to live without answers. To have your whole world wiped out, and not know who or why.’
‘You …’
Adam shook his head. ‘At least you know who, Max. At least you have that.’
‘What happened?’ She felt ill asking the question because she half knew the answer; it was there in Adam’s eyes, the grief he was letting her see for the first time. ‘Not Tia?’
He moved his mouth but didn’t speak. After a beat, he nodded.
Tia. His daughter. Dead.
‘When?’ Marnie asked.
He glanced at the tape recorder. She thought he was going to ask her to switch it off, but he didn’t. ‘Five years ago. Nearly … five years.’
When Tia was fourteen.
‘How?’
‘Coach crash. School trip. Not anyone’s fault, that was the verdict.’ He pushed the heels of his hands at his eyes. ‘Two dead kids and no one to blame. So … yeah. My marriage broke down. I was a wreck, a cliché. Too bound up in my own misery to care about anything else.’
‘That’s when you went abroad?’
‘I tried running, yeah, but guess what? You can’t outrun crap like that. I guess I don’t need to tell you …’ His mouth wrenched. ‘I lied about Tia. All those years ago, when she was just a kid and we were … I lied. Pretended I wasn’t a dad. Not hers, not anyone’s. Pretended she didn’t exist. Nothing like appreciating what you’ve got after it’s gone …’
His eyes blazed with unshed tears. ‘I let that drive me crazy for a bit. Then I found out you lost your mum and dad around the same time. I found out about that shit Stephen Keele. What he did to you, how he wouldn’t tell you why. It was different with Tia, there wasn’t anyone to blame, but Keele? There’s something there. A story. I could smell it a mile off.’
‘You smelt a story,’ Marnie repeated, sick with disbelief.
‘I didn’t want it for myself,’ Adam said angrily. ‘For you …’
‘This is penance? For what we did? Because you lied to me, pretended she didn’t exist?’
‘I wanted to bring you peace—’
‘By investigating Stephen’s parents.’ She cut him short. ‘What did you find?’
‘They’re preppers, just like Clancy’s lot.’
‘Do they know Clancy’s parents? Do they have any connection to this case?’
‘Maybe. Look.’ He leaned in, drawing a line on the table with his hand. ‘Merrick’s a crook. That’s why I followed the travellers.’
‘You followed Clancy too. Or you had him followed. Why?’
‘Something’s up with that kid. You saw it, I know you did. His parents are whack-jobs, just like Keele’s …’
‘And he’s the same age Stephen was when he went off the rails.’
‘Yes. Yes.’ Adam looked relieved, as if she’d finally got it.
‘Fourteen. The same age as Tia when she died. Clancy’s dropping out of school, getting into trouble, running away from home … What a waste of a life. He’s throwing it away.’
Not like Tia, who would have made her dad proud, had she lived.
Adam moved his head, adjusting his focus. Listening to what she was saying.
‘Believe what you like,’ he said at last. ‘I know what I was trying to do. I wanted to find you answers. It’s what I’m good at. So yeah,’ he nodded at the tape recorder, ‘go ahead and call me on my redemption bullshit, but Clancy led me to Scott and Chrissie Brand, who led me to Merrick and his merry men. To preppers. And back full circle to Stephen Keele.’
‘How, exactly?’
‘What if Keele’s parents knew Merrick? What if he built them a panic room?’
‘Did he?’
‘Ask me when I’m done digging.’
‘No, in other words. Even if they knew Merrick, they don’t know why Stephen did it. No one knows that except Stephen, and maybe even he doesn’t know. Do you know why you did the things you did when you were fourteen? I don’t.’
‘But you want to know,’ Adam insisted. ‘Why he did it. Why they died. I want to help. I can find the answers you’re after. I may be a scumbag, but I’m a nosy scumbag. I get results.’
She recognised the light in his eyes. Obsession. She’d been like that once.
‘Adam …’
‘These preppers,’ he said furiously, ‘they’re psychos. Scott and his fucking panic room like a padded cell … He’s got a gun, d’you know that? Scott Brand. He’s got a gun. With a licence, but so fucking what, frankly. They had a teenage boy in that house doing whatever
he wanted because there was no one telling him to stop and there’s a fucking firearm in the house … So he’s acting up, trying to get Mummy and Daddy’s attention and guess what? They don’t take him to a psychiatrist, they don’t sit him down and talk to him about why he keeps getting into fights at school, why he’s being excluded, why the other kids are accusing him of being a pervert even if the teachers never see anything …’
‘Adam …’
‘What’d they do? They fitted him with an alarm. Did Doyle tell you about that? An alarm, like a dog. They’d have had him microchipped if they could. Hey, if this was America, that’s exactly what they’d’ve done. Microchipped the little bastard, so they knew where he was whenever he sneaked off.’
‘A personal alarm system,’ Marnie said. ‘Yes, Terry told me about that. Do you know the name of the security company that provided the alarm?’
‘What?’ Adam looked baffled by the question.
‘Forget about Stephen Keele,’ she said. ‘I need to find Terry’s kids, and Clancy. Do you know the name of the security company that provided the personal alarm system the Brands gave to their son?’
‘He stopped using it when he went to live with Terry …’
‘All right. But if they kept the data, they might know where Clancy used to hang out. They might know his old hiding places. Do you have the name of the firm?’
‘No.’ Adam thought for a moment. ‘But I could find out.’
A knock on the door made Marnie look up.
Noah was outside the interview room, holding a phone.
Something had happened, it was written all over his face.
Through the glass he mouthed, ‘Front desk. You’ll want to come.’
9
At the front desk, two women were waiting.
One was in her sixties, five foot four, with silver hair and a softly creased face, grey eyes that chipped to ice as she saw Marnie and Noah. At her side, in a loose-fitting dark tracksuit, was a fair-haired woman about Marnie’s age and height.
Thin-faced, prematurely aged; the ghost of someone pretty hiding behind her eyes.
Barely recognisable.
She stood completely still, resting her stare on Marnie. The stare was intense, transfiguring her face. She had bad skin, pale and blotchy.
Prison pallor.
‘I’m Esther Reid,’ she said. ‘I’m the monster you’re looking for.’
10
Alison Oliver – Esther Reid – folded her hands in her lap. Her eyes were dry, her lips parched. She repeated the first words she’d used when she came into the station: ‘I’m the monster you’re looking for.’ Her voice was like her lips, cracked and thirsty.
‘Can you give your name, please, for the tape.’
‘I’m Alison Oliver.’
‘And you don’t want a solicitor present at this interview.’
‘No.’
Marnie said, ‘Have you ever gone by any other name?’
‘You know I have.’
‘For the tape, please.’
‘I was Esther Reid. Before that, I was Esther Pryce. Now I’m Alison Oliver. It doesn’t matter what name you use. I’m your monster. The one you’ve been looking for.’
Marnie could smell remorse leaching from the woman’s skin, a sweet-sour smell like a nursing mother’s. The dry eyes were a lie. Unless she’d cried all her tears in prison.
‘Why did you come to the police station today?’
‘To save you the trouble of coming after me. Or going after Connie, my mum.’
Connie Pryce had gone with Noah into a second interview room.
‘She calls me Alison now. She’s forgiven me. Can you believe that?’ The woman made fists of her hands and laid them in plain sight. ‘I murdered her grandchildren, but she’s forgiven me. She won’t even call me Esther. She believes in my rehabilitation.’
Slowly she uncurled her fists. Her hands were knotted with scar tissue, her nails bitten to the quick. Each time she moved her head, the strip lighting found another patch of damage: old scars on her neck and under her chin, a bruised indent where she’d pressed the end of the tracksuit’s zip into her throat. It was hard to look at her.
‘You came here because you knew we’d be looking for you. Why would we be looking?’
‘Because of Blackthorn Road, the bunker. I saw the papers, I know you found them. Fred and Archie. My boys.’ She blinked her eyes. ‘You’ve found my boys.’
‘You knew they were in a bunker on Blackthorn Road,’ Marnie said.
Alison leaned forward until the light found the cracks at the corners of her mouth. ‘I put them there.’ It wasn’t a boast, but nor was it simply a confession.
It was a demand: Look at me, your monster.
‘You told the police they drowned.’ Marnie referred to the woman’s statement from five years ago. ‘You said you drowned your daughter Louisa, and your sons Fred and Archie.’
‘I lied. I didn’t trust the police. I didn’t trust anyone.’
‘You were sick, we know that. You were suffering from hallucinations, paranoia …’
‘I murdered my children,’ she thrust the words at Marnie, ‘my baby daughter and my boys. They died a horrible death, at my hands. It’s on me.’
‘You served a prison term.’
‘I lied about the way they died. I shouldn’t be out. It’s not safe. We’re … I’m not safe.’ She licked at her lips. The tip of her tongue was an ugly mass of scar tissue.
‘This is why you came here,’ Marnie said, ‘because you feel unsafe.’
‘I came after I saw Connie. After she wouldn’t look at me, at Esther. All that forgiveness and I knew … I knew she wouldn’t ever look at me. At what I’d done … Have you ever felt remorse?’
‘Of course,’ Marnie said lightly. No ammunition in her voice, nothing the other woman could twist or use.
‘Hurts, doesn’t it? Real remorse, the proper realisation of what you’ve done … But you’ve never killed anyone. You’ve never felt remorse for anything as terrible as murder.’
‘No, I haven’t.’
‘If I was devising punishments, ways to make people suffer, that would be top of my list. Remorse, real remorse, is the best weapon. If you could inflict it. Administer it, say, in a not-quite-lethal dose.’ She was watching Marnie’s face and perhaps she saw something there, because her next words were stinging, intentionally or otherwise. ‘If there was someone you wanted to punish, someone who’d hurt you personally, that would be the way to do it. Make them feel remorse. Inflict it on them in whatever way you could. There’s no pain like it.’
She sat back in the chair, her face grieving for a second before she stiffened it into the mask she’d worn when she walked into the station.
Marnie took a photograph from the folder at her elbow and placed it on the table, facing towards the other woman.
Alison Oliver blinked. ‘Who …?’
‘Do you know him?’
She shook her head, but her eyes snagged on the photo as if she couldn’t look away.
‘Clancy Brand. He’s fourteen years old.’
‘No …’
‘You’ve not met or spoken with this boy. Are you certain of that?’
‘Yes. Who is he?’ She blinked at the photograph. ‘He looks …’ Her voice dried up.
Marnie waited, but the woman was silent.
‘Have you been to Snaresbrook in the last fortnight?’
‘Of course not.’ Reflexively. ‘That would be a violation of the terms of my parole.’
Marnie took two more photographs from the folder and placed them on the table.
The other woman leaned close, her mouth twisting in recognition.
Recognition.
‘Why are you showing me these?’ Her voice was a whisper now, scared.
‘They’re missing. Carmen and Thomas Doyle. Carmen is three and a half years old, Thomas is just two. They live at number 14 Blackthorn Road. The house where the bunker was found.’
Marnie’s thumbs pricked, hotly. ‘Where were you between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. today?’
‘With Connie. I was … with Connie.’
‘Where?’
‘In Slough. Then we caught a train here.’
‘Which train. I need times, please.’
Alison recited the train times. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the photos. The look on her face made Marnie clench her hands under the lip of the table.
Alison Oliver knew something. About the missing children.
It was all over her face, spilling out of her eyes.
‘Did you take them? Alison? Did you take Carmen and Thomas?’
‘No …’ The woman looked stricken.
‘Then … Esther. Did Esther take them?’
Alison shook her head, but she said, ‘Yes. Yes. Yes.’
She put up her hands and dragged at her hair.
It made Marnie wince. ‘Tell me.’
‘Esther,’ Alison said. ‘Esther did this.’
11
Connie Pryce’s stare was so direct and unapologetic that Noah wondered whether it wasn’t a disguise, her way of keeping questions at bay. She stated her name for the tape, speaking in crisp syllables that didn’t belong in a travellers’ ground, or a police interview room.
‘Your DI Rome … does she understand about my girl in there?’
‘We spoke with Lyn Birch, Esther’s psychiatrist.’
‘Alison’s psychiatrist,’ Connie corrected.
Commander Welland hadn’t believed in Esther’s reincarnation as Alison Oliver, but Connie did, fixing on her daughter’s new name insistently. ‘Lyn talks a lot of nonsense, but she’s right about one thing. Alison’s not the one you want to worry about.’
‘Esther …’ Noah began again.
‘It killed her,’ Connie said. ‘The business with the boys, with the baby … It broke her. That’s the truth. Broke her heart, and the rest of her along with it.’
She delivered the speech briskly, as if sympathy was the last thing she wanted. The soft face was a disguise; she was hard as nails. Was she?
‘You collected Alison on the day of her parole, two weeks ago. Is that right?’ He watched the woman nod. ‘And she’s been with you, at your home in Slough, since then?’
