by Fiona Harper
He smiles at her and she starts to smile back, knowing that everything is going to be okay, that maybe he’s decided they can stop sneaking around, that this is the moment when they’re going to tell everyone they’re an item, but then he slowly pulls something from his blazer pocket and holds it high in the air. It’s only when his arm is at full stretch that Heather works out what is dangling from his fingers.
Her knickers.
‘Lost something?’ he asks, still smiling, and everybody laughs.
Heather tries to speak, but nothing comes out. Nothing useful anyway.
‘Low-down, skanky slut,’ Tia Paine says. ‘You dropped them for Ryan in record time – and there’s the actual proof!’
Heather searches Ryan’s face. This has to be a mistake. Tia has tricked him into this somehow.
But then she sees his expression. It’s the same as this morning when she walked past him into school, but this time her translation of it is different. It’s not passion she sees there, but triumph. Not possessiveness, but ownership. Those things might seem similar but they are actually very, very different. Her eyes fill with tears.
‘I don’t understand.’
Ryan shrugs. ‘It’s simple. Tia asked me to do a favour for her – a little acting role – and in return she’s going to put in a good word for me with her uncle. There’s a chance that he could get me an audition for the next Harry Potter.’
Heather tears her eyes from his to look at Tia. ‘You…?’
Tia does one of her twisty little smirks. She’s so happy she can hardly contain herself. She takes a step towards Heather, towering over her. ‘Those kinds of favours are expensive, but it was worth it. He played his part wonderfully well, didn’t he? But I reckon we’ll have to change your name now. No longer “Hobo”. We’ll just shorten it to “Ho”.’
It all sinks in then. Tia was behind all this? She’d actually planned it, knickers and everything? The truth descends on Heather like one of those booby-trapped ceilings in an Indiana Jones or James Bond movie, the kind that suddenly start pressing downwards, full of knives, crushing and shredding their victims. She turns and runs.
‘Don’t you want your knickers, freak?’ Tia calls after her, a jubilant edge to her tone. ‘Your skanky, stinky, hobo knickers?’
Heather wants to lie down right there and die, but she can’t so she just keeps running.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
NOW
Heather is unsure how much time has passed when the cell door clangs again. PC Calder appears and stands at the open door. ‘You can leave now,’ she says.
Heather looks back at her but doesn’t move. She must have heard that wrong.
‘The Haven Project has decided not to press charges,’ Calder explains. ‘So you’re free to go.’
It takes Heather a few moments to process this information. All she can hear inside her head is the strident tones of the receptionist: I saw her do it! Bloody disgrace, nicking from women with problems. But then she unfolds her legs, which creak and complain at the unexpected movement, stuffs her feet in the borrowed plimsolls, and shrugs the blanket off, leaving it on the bench.
She follows PC Calder out of the cell and back to the custody sergeant’s desk, where she is reunited with the plastic bag full of her worldly goods and her heels. She hands the plimsolls back silently and puts her shoes on. Her feet seem to have swollen up in the cell, and the leather pinches as she clip-clops her way out of the back exit of the police station.
‘There’s somebody waiting for you in the main reception,’ Calder says, giving her a kindly smile. ‘Just walk out through the car park, turn left, then come back in through the double doors at the front of the building.’
Heather hobbles along the tarmac, clutching the plastic bag to her as if her life depends on it. She rounds the corner and even before she pushes the glass doors open, she can see Jason sitting there. Part of her is dreading seeing him again, the other part just wants to sink against him and sob with relief.
The door squeaks slightly when she opens it, and he looks up. His eyes are dull, as if he was on the verge of nodding off. The moment he sees her, though, he springs to his feet.
‘Thank God!’ he whispers into her ear as his arms close around her. ‘I kept trying to tell them they’d got the wrong person, but they just wouldn’t listen! That woman in the green dress – my God! – she was like a dog with a bone. It’s just as well Lydia stepped in and spoke to the top people—’
‘Lydia?’ Heather echoes weakly.
Jason nods. ‘I don’t know what she said, because she went into the interview room with that other couple, but when they came out again everything was sorted. They didn’t look happy exactly, but they’ve dropped it. That’s what they told me, anyway. Is that true?’
‘Yes. It’s true.’
Jason blows out a breath, runs a hand through his already tousled hair and sits back down on the row of seats. It doesn’t escape Heather they’re identical to the ones in the custody suite: hard blue plastic, designed to make you as uncomfortable as possible, it seems.
‘Thank God that’s over,’ he mumbles, shaking his head. He looks impossibly handsome, still in his dinner jacket, with his top button undone and his bow tie hanging loose around his neck. He looks up at her. ‘What happened exactly? No one would tell me anything. How did they make such an awful mistake in the first place?’
He looks at her expectantly, his eyes full of so much trust that Heather wilts into the seat beside him. Usually she’d find a way to wriggle out, explain, misdirect, but that urge for self-preservation has been completely overridden. She can’t do this to him any more. He’s all ready to leap on his white charger and defend her honour, but it’s actually him that needs protecting. From her.
Sitting in that cell, stripped of everything she had – not just her belongings but her pride, her self-protection, every single mask she wears – has made her realize this is what she has to do. She has to sweep everything clean. She has to be brave enough to do what her mother never could: let everything go, even if it’s the thing most precious to her. She takes a deep breath, preparing to launch herself over the edge, like a diver on high rocks.
‘You don’t know me. You think you do, but you really don’t.’
‘But—’
‘There was no mistake this evening. I took it. I took the handbag.’
He looks so confused it almost breaks Heather’s heart. ‘But how? You must have just…’
Heather shakes her head. ‘I meant to. I…’ She gulps in some air then carries on. ‘I stole it. At least, I tried to. I deserved to be in that cell. I’ve been lying to you, Jason. I’m not who you think I am.’
He finally stops trying to argue her innocence with her, and his jaw tenses.
At that moment, Faith pushes her way through the front doors. She looks irritated and scared and confused all at once. She scans the reception area and spots Heather sitting there. Heather stands up.
Faith walks towards her, shaking her head. ‘What the hell have you done?’ she asks, but there are tears in her eyes. She pulls Heather into a firm hug and holds her there, surrounded. Protected.
When Faith lets go, Heather turns and nods towards Jason.
‘This is Jason,’ she tells her sister. ‘He was with me but not… you know… involved in what happened.’
Jason stands up, frowning. He offers Faith his hand. In the circumstances, it seems oddly formal and Heather finds she wants to laugh. She manages to hold it in, though.
‘Hi,’ he says. ‘You must be Heather’s sister. I’ve heard a lot about you.’
Faith shoots Heather a look, one that says: This is ‘him’, isn’t it? Not bad.
But Heather hasn’t got time for that. ‘Faith’s come to get me,’ she tells Jason quietly, meeting his eyes.
‘But I’ve been waiting here for hours…’
‘I know. Thank you, but I rang Faith from the custody suite. I asked her to come and get me. I’m sorry.’<
br />
‘But—’
‘I need my family,’ she explains, feeling steadily more sick as she says each word. ‘And like I said, you don’t really know me. We don’t really know each other.’
She understands that she’s being cruel dismissing him this way. He’s done nothing but stand by her and believe in her, but she can’t risk being nice to him. It might soften things between them and she needs them to be brittle and hard.
‘Goodbye, Jason,’ she says. ‘Thank you.’ And then she picks up her plastic bag full of belongings and her wrap and follows Faith back out into the night.
She doesn’t look back. Just like the plimsolls, she has to leave him behind. He was only ever borrowed.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
NOW
It’s almost two o’clock when they reach Faith’s house. The sisters enter quietly, leaving their shoes by the front door and padding across the hardwood floor to the conservatory, the room furthest away from the stairs and most likely to keep their conversation from disturbing Faith’s sleeping family. Faith makes them both a cup of herbal tea and then goes to root around in the utility room for some alternative clothes for Heather. She returns with a pair of sports leggings and a soft, fleecy top.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I didn’t want to risk waking the kids, so you’ll have to make do with what’s come out of the dryer.’
Heather strips off right there in her sister’s conservatory. When she’s finished dressing, she curls herself up into one end of the large rattan sofa and prepares herself. Faith, strangely, didn’t interrogate Heather on the way back to Westerham. Even more strangely, Heather finds she wants to spill everything out now her sister hasn’t tried to prise it from her before she’s ready.
She starts with the bare facts: meeting Lydia, their conversation on the terrace, stopping by the auction table when she came back inside. She comes clean to her sister about the remains of their mother’s hoard hidden inside her flat, and about her shoplifting habit and the drawer at home stuffed full of contraband. She even tells her about the plastic animals she took when she was shopping for Barney’s birthday. Faith’s eyes widen, but she doesn’t comment until Heather runs out of steam.
‘Oh, wow,’ she whispers. ‘How long has this been going on?’
‘Since Mum died. Well, I stole for the first time about two months after that.’
‘And always kids’ stuff?’
Heather nods. ‘I just get this horrible feeling and it builds and builds until I can’t stop myself.’
‘Oh, sweetheart.’ Much to Heather’s surprise, instead of telling her off, reprimanding her for breaking one of the Ten Commandments, Faith comes over and hugs her. They stay like that for a minute, silent tears falling down their cheeks, and then they pull apart, snuffling a laugh simultaneously at how attractive they must now look. ‘Mum really did a number on you, didn’t she?’ Faith adds softly. ‘I suppose I always knew it was bad, but when you were younger it just seemed like teenage stroppiness, and then I got married and had the kids and I just… I’m so sorry, Heather. I saw but I didn’t really see. Not properly. I should have done more.’
Heather shakes her head. ‘No, don’t take the blame for this. It wasn’t your fault.’ Somehow, saying these words, even though Heather has always known they were the truth, releases something inside her. It rises up out of her, like a helium-filled balloon, and floats away. ‘Mum was always good at passing the buck, making everyone else feel responsible for her mess – literally! – and the truth is it was all down to her.’
Faith punches her arm softly. ‘Look at you, talking about feelings and stuff!’
Heather rolls her eyes and they both laugh softly. It reminds her of when she and Faith were younger, the rare times Faith would let her sit on her bed and she’d read her a story because their mother was too busy.
But then Faith gets serious again. ‘So, if toys and baby clothes are your “thing”, why did you take the handbag?’
Heather shrugs helplessly. ‘All I know is that I was trying really hard not to be angry with Mum, just to get through the rest of the evening without exploding into a ball of red-hot lava, and then suddenly the bag was there. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t choose to do it. I just did it.’
Faith nods. ‘If there’s anything we should have learned from our childhood, it’s that burying emotions never, ever works. Even in a house full of stuff piled so high it almost reached the ceiling, Mum couldn’t get away from them.’
Heather takes a sip of her tea. ‘You think that’s what I was doing?’
‘Yes. I do. I think maybe the stealing is somehow connected – in the same way that Mum was driven to “collect”, even when she knew it was destroying her family. Even when it ruined her whole life. There was a pay-off somewhere, something that made her feel better.’
‘But what inside my warped brain makes stealing things the solution to my problem?’
Faith shrugs and moves back to the opposite end of the sofa so they can look at each other more comfortably. ‘I don’t know. It doesn’t always make sense, though, does it? Mum’s problem didn’t make sense to anyone, not even her, not on a conscious level.’ She ponders for a moment. ‘Do you have any idea at all why you’re attracted to baby clothes?’
Heather closes her eyes. A gaping hole has just opened up underneath her, one she knew from the moment she started this conversation she was heading towards, but it doesn’t make the moment of arrival any less awful.
‘Because,’ she whispers, keeping her eyes closed. ‘Because there’s something you don’t know. Something that happened when I was fifteen… ’
CHAPTER FIFTY
NOW
If Matthew is surprised to find his sister-in-law sprawled halfasleep on the conservatory sofa wearing his wife’s clothes the next morning, he doesn’t comment. He just goes and makes two cups of tea and then drinks his with her in silence before going to get the kids ready for church. The fact he’s getting used to her just popping up unannounced, and usually in a state of crisis, is not a good thing, Heather realizes. It means she is becoming a problem with a capital ‘P’. She needs to get a grip on her life, and she needs to do it soon.
Faith takes the unprecedented move of staying home with her sister. While she’s flicking through the Sunday papers, she looks over at Heather, who is reading a novel she found on the bathroom windowsill.
‘I had no idea you didn’t know the house had been bad before the abduction,’ Faith says. ‘For me, it felt as if it had always been that way.’
Heather nods. It had felt that way for her too. ‘It was only when I found that photo with the clear walls that I started to question that assumption,’ she says. ‘I don’t know how to make sense of it.’
Faith shrugs. ‘Mum would have these blitzes from time to time. Maybe she’d made an effort just before that picture was taken because Christmas was coming up?’
‘Maybe,’ Heather says. She supposes they’ll never have the answer to that one.
Faith folds the paper she is reading back up neatly. ‘I think we should Skype Dad early, before Matthew and the kids get back,’ she says. ‘I know he doesn’t like to talk about it but there are things I’d certainly like to ask him about Mum’s hoarding.’
Heather sighs. ‘Do you ever talk to him about how it was before you left?’
Faith shakes her head. ‘No. After we moved out it became a bit of a no-go area. To be honest, I can’t blame him.’
‘Neither can I.’ It’s why Heather hasn’t pushed all these years. Christine Lucas broke him too. She broke them all.
‘Are you up for it?’ Faith asks, looking nervous.
Heather nods. ‘You’re right. There’s stuff we need to know. I’d been trying to keep him out of it – I didn’t want to open up those old wounds.’
‘Okay,’ Faith says, standing up. ‘Let’s do it.’
Five minutes later they’re staring at a slightly pixelated image of their father on Faith’s tablet, which
is propped up on the diningroom table.
‘Hi, girls!’ he says, smiling as their stepmother leans in over his shoulder and gives them a little wave.
They wade through the inevitable small talk but before their father ends the call, Heather takes a deep breath and says, ‘Can I ask you something, Dad? About Mum?’
The smile falls from his face. Shirley puts a concerned hand on his shoulder. ‘I suppose so,’ he replies.
‘Do you know why she started doing what she did… hoarding? Was there any sense to it at all?’
He sighs.
‘I’ll leave you to have a chat,’ Shirley says, patting his shoulder and exiting discreetly. Moments later Heather hears the sound of a vacuum cleaner in another room.
Their father frowns, thinking. ‘I always considered her one of those creative types, you know, a bit disorganized, a bit messy, but it was nothing out of the ordinary when I first knew her.’
Faith leans in. ‘When did it start?’
‘After you were born,’ their father replies. At first I thought she was just nesting, you know, like all new mums do. She kept buying clothes and toys and little helpful gadgets. I could hardly prise her out of Mothercare if we went in on a Saturday afternoon.’
Heather’s stomach goes cold. After last night’s events, the last thing she wants to think about is the scene of any of her crimes.
‘I begged her to slow down – cash was tight, what with her not working and having a new baby in the house – and she always said she would stop, but every day when I got home there’d be something new in the hallway. And then she told me that as a stay-at-home mum, she needed a hobby or two.’ He sighs heavily. ‘You know what she was like. You could talk to her until you were blue in the face, but you couldn’t change her mind.’
‘Okay,’ Heather says, sorting all the pieces of information into some kind of order in her head. ‘So having kids triggered it, but there has to be something more. That need has to have come from somewhere. Is there anything in her past, in her childhood?’
‘I really don’t know,’ their father says. ‘The only person who would know that is Kathy.’ Faith and Heather exchange a look. ‘Is there anything else?’ he asks, shifting in his seat, and Heather knows he’s dying to change the subject.
