by Darren Young
I thought that was the way out I needed.
But when it happened, when I saw that damn letter, I couldn’t do it.
I think that, despite what everyone said about what had happened to her, because I knew that she was alive I also knew that I had to be there waiting if she found her way back to me.
And so I breathed.
24 | Laura
High Cliffs House was a privately run mental health unit that, as its name indicated, sat on one of the highest points of the road that ran along the most easterly corner of the North Devon coast.
Laura had parked her car in the small staff and visitor car park on the opposite side of the road, and she now saw why: the old car park was still partly visible, right next to the building, but the erosion of the cliff face had seen the corner of it fall on to the rocks, a hundred feet below, and the rest had been cordoned off by a metal fence, with streams of red and white plastic ribbon to warn people of the danger. The building, dirty white and imposing, sat further back, roughly seventy yards from the cliff edge, although Laura did wonder for how much longer as she walked up the pathway to the main reception doors.
With lighter weekend traffic on the roads, the SatNav had predicted her arrival time to within a few minutes, and having left plenty of time to spare she had sat in the car preparing for the interview, even though nothing that came from it might ever see the light of day.
As she reached the large front doors, she heard the crash of waves on the rocks below, and she took a look up at the ominous dark grey sky that had threatened rain all morning without actually delivering it. The sea the cliffs overlooked was as grey as the sky, except for the tufts of surf the fierce wind exposed.
Laura felt the salty spray in the air. It was hard to see where the sky stopped and the sea started, and the building felt cold, miserable and uninviting; nothing like any of the images on the website, which were the kind an estate agent would take, that made everything look bigger and brighter, and where the sun was always out, in a clear blue sky with a cobalt sea below.
The door was locked. She pressed the intercom button and announced her arrival and the receptionist let her in. The reception area was poorly lit, with a wide, sweeping front desk and odd sofas and chairs positioned as a makeshift waiting area in front of it. The receptionist appeared through the door behind the desk, greeted her with a warm smile and took her though the visitor procedures, then presented her with a laminated visitor pass on a blue cord with a large number eight in black on the front.
Laura sunk into one of the comfier-looking chairs and waited a few minutes until the manager arrived through another door and greeted her.
‘Thanks for doing this,’ Laura said, shaking her hand.
The manager nodded with indifference and asked for identification and inspected her Gazette staff card. ‘Sandra will see you in the main room,’ she said, ushering Laura towards the large double doors at the other end of the reception area.
‘OK.’
‘We do have visitor rooms, but Sandra prefers … ’
She opened the doors to a much bigger room, a huge space with large sash windows all around it and a variety of chairs and tables around the edge, with a wooden area, that looked as if it might once have been a dance floor, in the middle. It was full of light, despite the depressing gloom outside, but its light grey paintwork was clinical and unfriendly. Laura stepped inside and followed her.
Spread around the room were fifteen people, and all but one of them, Laura quickly deduced, were patients, the other a nurse who was trying to watch as many of them as possible while her attention was being taken up by one in particular, a gangly six-foot woman in a long white nightgown who was trying to climb on to the sill of one of the huge windows.
Laura scanned the faces in front of her, but couldn’t recognise any of them as being Sandra from the photos she had seen.
‘She doesn’t usually get any visitors,’ the manager said as they made their way across the room, Laura following a step behind, mostly unnoticed and ignored, other than by one male patient, who quickly looked her up and down and then turned away. The nurse shouted across to another man who had started to open the button on his trousers, and that made everyone look over at him, including Laura, distracting her and almost making her trip on the edge of a thick and well-worn rug as she reached a table and two chairs in front of one of the windows.
Sitting in the armchair was a woman, her hair grey and straggly, her face pencil-thin; and she was dressed in a long cardigan and house slippers. Laura was shocked; she looked twice the age that she knew her to be.
‘Your visitor, Sandra.’
Laura tried to hide her surprise, and held out her hand, but the woman didn’t look at her, let alone shake it. The manager smiled and left them, and Laura stood looking out of the window. The views must be incredible on a good day, she thought, but today it was hard to see what she was looking at, although she could just see a patch of sand poking out from the rocks below as the tide began to go out.
‘Horrible, isn’t it?’ mumbled Sandra.
Laura sat down on the wooden chair on the other side of the table and politely smiled as she removed her coat and took her notepad from her bag. ‘Thank you for seeing me, Mrs Preston. I’m Lau—’
‘You didn’t answer me,’ she interrupted, never taking her eyes off the beach below.
‘Answer?’
‘About this place.’
‘It’s not … ’
Sandra chuckled to herself. ‘You don’t need to lie. You get used to it, believe me, but that first time you see it must be a bit of a shock for someone like you.’
‘Like me?’
‘Young. Bet you didn’t know that places like this even existed, did you?’
Laura shrugged and pretended it was all in a day’s work, but she knew Sandra was right: she hadn’t been anywhere like this before; she’d never had a reason to.
‘What with Bloody Mary trying to climb out of the window for the tenth time today already,’ Sandra continued, ‘and Old Tony playing with himself in the corner.’
‘I really appreciate—’
‘Trouble is, what else they gonna do? They get put here and they’re lucky if their family visit twice a year. I can’t recall Tony having a visitor since I’ve been here. No one cares, no one gives them anything to focus on. If they did … ’
‘I’m sure you’re right,’ Laura said slowly, and knew immediately that it sounded patronising.
‘I’m not like the others, Laura. You don’t have to talk to me as if I don’t know what day it is. Or worry that I might try to climb out of the window.’
Sandra didn’t turn her head when she spoke. She was perfectly still but her eyes were alert, darting around all corners of the beach below.
Laura smiled and put her pad on the table. The receptionist walked towards them with a tray and placed a cup of tea on the table in front of Sandra and another on a coaster on Laura’s side, plus a small glass of water.
‘You didn’t say if you wanted a hot or cold drink, so I got you both.’
‘That’s great, thank you.’
The receptionist walked back to the main doors. Sandra’s head was still close to the glass, studying the ground below as the receding tide began to expose more sand.
‘How long have you been here, Mrs Preston?’
‘Since they decided I was crazy.’
Laura held her pencil to the paper but wasn’t sure what to write. She just settled on the word ‘crazy’ and put a large question mark next to it.
‘But they don’t only stick you in here if they think you’re crazy,’ Sandra said with half a smile.
‘No?’
The woman shook her head.
‘No,’ she said ruefully. ‘They also put you here if your child goes missing and you won’t accept their version of events.’
25 | Danni
‘He was bothering you.’
Danni put her hands on her forehead and sighed. S
he and her father had been talking for the first time since he had picked her up, and although at the time she had been relieved at his intervention, she hadn’t been pleased to find out why he had turned up as he did. He’d already admitted that he had driven around to Sam’s to see where she was and then followed her home.
‘I’m not a little girl any more. I could have taken care of it,’ she snapped back.
‘You looked uncomfortable.’
‘He was just a kid who’d had too much to drink. And I was virtually home.’
Her father sighed now. He had always hated confrontation. ‘I was just trying to help you.’
‘I don’t need your help.’
‘You’re my daughter.’
Danni looked up, a fiery glint in her eye and one that told her father he’d said the wrong thing but that it was too late; it couldn’t be unsaid.
‘Your daughter, am I?’
‘What do you mean?’
She looked right into his eyes. They held that uncomfortable expression again. ‘I was just checking.’ Danni almost spat it out. ‘Checking you knew who I was, because you’ve barely said a word to me since Mum died.’
He looked down.
‘And I’ve hardly seen you in that time either.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Danni waved away his apology. ‘What is sorry going to do? We both lost her, Dad. You shut me out when I needed you most.’
‘I’ve handled things badly.’
‘It’s not a project. I don’t want you to handle things; I just want you to be a father all the time. Not just someone who shows up when I get followed by a pissed-up arsehole.’
‘Danni!’
She stormed off to her room, to get away from her father because she knew she was going to swear more if they continued talking, and that would set them off again. As she lay on her bed, she thought he might come in to attempt a reconciliation, but instead she heard him go into his study, and didn’t hear him again until the next morning. They missed each other at breakfast and then, later that evening, he tiptoed around the house to avoid her, and when they passed at one point the best either could do was to grunt a goodnight that felt very forced. The next day was the same, and Danni found herself avoiding him too, looking for ways to be in different rooms or waiting until he had left a room before she went in. She finally decided enough was enough, and the following morning she intended to make the first move and clear the air.
But as she walked into the kitchen he was putting his coat on.
‘Morning.’
‘Can’t stop,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I’ve a train to catch and I’m already late.’
Danni sat at the breakfast table as he gathered his wallet and keys and picked up his briefcase. He was an extremely organised man, one who didn’t leave it too late to leave the house if he had a train departure to make. He must be using it as an excuse to avoid having to talk.
‘I’m off, then.’
‘Right, see you tonight.’
‘You won’t actually,’ he said, checking his watch. ‘I’m away until tomorrow night. Research. See you.’
‘Bye.’
She watched as he struggled out of the door with his overnight bag in one hand and his briefcase and car keys in the other. When the car had pulled away and she could no longer hear the engine she put her head in her hands and began to cry. Floods of tears came out and she wasn’t even exactly sure who they were for; it was the first time she’d cried since the funeral.
She thought a couple of days on her own might do her some good, and it was her day off so she lay on the sofa, watched daytime television and grazed on anything she could find in the kitchen cupboards, but by lunchtime she felt sick and was fed up and lonely. The house, big and draughty at the best of times, felt colder than she’d ever known it, even with the heating dial turned to maximum, and she put on a thick woolly jumper over her pyjamas.
The afternoon was worse than the morning. She found herself pottering around, unable to concentrate on any task for long or find anything that she wanted to do. She even took to digging out an old box of photographs and thumbing through them for pictures of her mother, until she realised it was making her feel worse rather than better.
She picked up one of her favourite photos, taken as her mother was about to leave the house on the evening of her fiftieth birthday, when they had all gone out as a family for a meal, and stared at it, recalling the occasion. Patricia hadn’t wanted to go, she hadn’t thought turning fifty was anything to celebrate, and a teenage Danni had snapped her as she put on her shoes in the hallway. ‘Smile!’ Danni had shouted, creeping up on her blind side, and her mother had tried to hide her face but Danni was too quick and the image had captured her mother as she always thought of her: beautiful, yet reluctant to be in the spotlight; much happier staying in the shadows.
She gazed at the photograph and felt a pain in her stomach.
She looked around at the walls: her mother had chosen all the décor and hung paintings and the whole place reflected her taste and sense of style. But Danni realised that, without her mother actually being there, it felt as though she was visiting an art gallery. It was all very nice – but she didn’t want to stay there for ever.
She picked up her phone from the coffee table and called the one person she felt she could still trust implicitly. Samantha detected her despondent tone immediately.
‘Things no better?’
‘Worse, if anything.’
‘Did you talk?’ her friend asked, and Danni gave her a brief summary of the way things had gone since she had last seen her.
‘That’s not good, Dan.’
‘I’ve had enough. I wanted to ask you a favour.’
‘Anything. You know that.’
‘Would it be OK if I came to stay with you?’
26 | Laura
They had skirted around the main topic since Laura had got there. Sandra still hadn’t taken her eyes off the beach, which now had a hundred-foot-wide strip of sand that disappeared off into the gloom.
Laura had asked some background questions as she tried to find a way to talk about the woman’s daughter. Sandra had toyed with her, being deliberately cryptic or simply manoeuvring around a question with a swift change of subject. When she’d said she was here because she refused to believe the official verdict on what had happened, Laura had tried to press her gently to continue, but she’d started talking about Bloody Mary again and the moment had passed. But she had been there thirty minutes now, and it was time to be more direct.
‘What do you think happened to Jessica?’
Laura looked directly at Sandra but her eyes remained fixed on the beach below. She looked down at the carefully prepared ice-breaking questions on her pad, none of which had been asked. The ice hadn’t been broken yet. It hadn’t been that kind of interview.
She waited as Sandra considered her answer. From the other side of the room, Bloody Mary eyed her up and down suspiciously, and Laura had to look away when their eyes met.
‘I know she didn’t drown.’
‘How can you be sure?’
Sandra frowned as if she didn’t like to be doubted, and took a while to find her words. ‘Because someone took her.’
Laura had read about this in the articles on the internet. Even when just about everyone else had concluded that her daughter must have drowned, Sandra had stuck to the abduction theory, despite a lack of any witnesses in the several hundred people on the beach. She asked Sandra why no one had seen anything.
‘They weren’t looking for her, were they?’
‘Wouldn’t she have cried out if someone tried to take her?’
Sandra stared at the beach. Laura could see in her frown lines that it was something she’d contemplated before. ‘She obviously didn’t.’
‘But surely someone would remember seeing her.’
‘She didn’t drown.’
Laura watched the woman’s eyes, scanning the sand and waves below. If she lacked co
nviction in what she was saying, she didn’t show it.
‘I’m just doing my job,’ Laura said quietly. ‘I’m just trying to work out why everyone was so sure she’d gone in the water.’
‘Her hat, I suppose.’
Sandra’s head dropped. Laura looked at her, waiting for more. She hadn’t seen anything about a hat in her research.
‘They found her hat. It washed up on a beach half a mile away, about a fortnight later. That was enough for the police. Enough for most people.’
Laura scribbled shorthand in her notepad but didn’t speak for a minute until she felt Sandra was ready for the question.
‘So how do you think it got there?’
‘I don’t know.’
Laura rubbed her chin but Sandra was clearly discounting the damning evidence, selectively it seemed. She decided to leave it for now and move on. ‘Tell me about Jessica.’
Sandra turned her head a fraction, not enough to look at Laura but her expression had changed, as if she had finally been asked a question she wanted to answer. ‘I could say the things I said to the other reporters,’ she said sadly.
Laura held her pencil against the pad.
‘I could say she was this and that, but truth is she wasn’t even three years old and I don’t really know if she was any of those things.’
‘How come?’
‘I was too busy to notice.’
Laura wasn’t sure if it was an excuse or if she was chastising herself.
‘I was working two jobs, trying to be a wife and bring up two kids. I never seemed to have a second.’
‘But you still raised her.’
‘I was her mother for what seemed like ten minutes. Her brother was a handful, to put it mildly, never gave me a break, but Jess was much easier, so she’d get plonked in her pushchair most of the time.’
Sandra sniffed and Laura didn’t know if she should push her further, but the woman blew her nose and continued.
‘I didn’t know how little I knew her until she’d gone. At the time, you just carry on, don’t you? I never thought she suddenly wouldn’t be there one day.’
