My Mother, the Liar

by Ann Troup

  Strangely, it still bugged him that Charlie had been in Rachel’s room. The air between them had been crackling with tension when he had walked in and whatever their agenda was, it was surely loaded with something more than curiousity.

  It hadn’t taken him long to work out that there was more between Charlie Jones and Rachel Porter than met the eye – Charlie’s links to the Porter house went further than his past criminal record. The fact that his mother owned a photograph of a girl who was the spit of Rachel had sparked Ratcliffe’s instincts and he’d been more than a little smug when the team had turned up a marriage certificate and a birth certificate.

  Maybe Rachel and Charlie assumed that he already knew that they were married, but neither of them had volunteered it and there had been no mention of their child. Though Jones had balked when Rachel got upset about the dead baby. If Rachel was telling the truth about having left years before and having no contact, she had left her kid too.

  She came across as a nice woman – shy, worried, but nice. Could a woman who’d left her own child be called nice? It depended on the circumstances he supposed, but Charlie Jones had been convicted of murder and quite frankly Ratcliffe wouldn’t have left Delia Jones in charge of his dog. To leave a baby with those two would be a determinedly odd thing to choose. Rachel Porter needled him. She wasn’t what she appeared to be and there was far more to that situation than met the eye. And he was going to find out what it was.

  ***

  Back in the incident room, he picked up a message to call Ferris. News was in on the bodies. All he wanted at that point was a decent cuppa and time to think, not a visit to the morgue.

  Why couldn’t these forensic people just send a report? He never had understood the necessity of having to be shown the gruesome evidence in all its glory laid out on a slab. What was he supposed to do with the mental images? Chat about them to his wife over dinner? Although it might make an interesting change to Maria Ratcliffe’s usual moaning. Not that he could blame her for getting hacked off. She was a good woman who’d had to put up with a lot from him over the years.

  Ferris had completed a basic exam on both victims. Her initial conclusions were that Baxter, whose identity she had confirmed by discovering his wallet still intact inside his rotting clothes, had still been alive when he was placed in the trunk. She showed the detective the feeble scratch marks that scarred the underside of the lid.

  ‘I don’t think he was alive for long, and I don’t think he had much strength left when he made these marks. There is some considerable damage to the skull; I suspect that he was hit repeatedly with something heavy and hard. He would have died from a combination of those injuries and suffocation. There was a substantial amount of sand in his throat. Now that he is out of the sand, and out of an airtight box, he’s going to deteriorate rapidly so I needed to find out as much as I could as soon as I could. I also found something clutched in his hand.’ She held up a bag containing a small gold earring, shaped like a teardrop. ‘My guess is that it belongs to whoever killed him.’

  Ratcliffe took the bag and examined the earring. It wasn’t an uncommon design, nothing special at all. Still, if someone could identify it as belonging to Stella, it might strengthen his thoughts on the case. ‘What about the baby? Anything there?’

  Ferris sighed. Hardened as they both were to the nature of their jobs, kids were always a tough call on everyone. ‘I think he was dead before he was put in the box. It looks like he was stillborn. To be honest it’s difficult to tell. From the skeleton, the size of the skull, and the length of the long bones, it looks like he had congenital problems. We did manage to salvage this though.’ She passed him another bag containing several thin strips of material. ‘It was what he was dressed in.’

  Through the clear plastic Ratcliffe could see a name embroidered on the fabric. ‘Daniel,’ he said aloud. ‘At least the poor little thing had a name.’

  ‘Anyway, I still have tests to do, and should be getting more results in soon. I’ll let you know as soon as anything comes in,’ Ferris said, bristling. As if she was far too busy to indulge in such mawkish sentiments.

  ***

  Ratcliffe was relieved to be outside and breathing air that didn’t have the rancid aftertaste of decay. No matter how scrupulously clean Ferris’s staff tried to be in there, the whole place still stank of death as far as he was concerned.

  He was puzzled by the assertion that Baxter had been alive when he had been stashed in the trunk. From what they did know about Stella, she was a tiny little thing. Baxter had been six foot tall so how had such a small woman managed to manhandle someone that size into a great big trunk? His only conclusion was that she must have had help, which meant that someone else had known that the body was there. His money was on the mother, the dead and therefore perpetually silent Valerie.

  They had to find Stella, which meant he had a very good excuse to pay Frances’s husband, Peter Haines, another visit.

  Chapter 6

  In Rachel’s room, the atmosphere was thick with negativity. Waves of tension were washing across the room, fixing them both into the moment and forcing an uneasy silence. DS Ratcliffe had only just left, but his questions glowed neon bright in Charlie’s mind as if displayed on an imaginary autocue. ‘How well did you know Stella?’; ‘What kind of person is she?’; ‘Did she ever discuss her relationship with her husband with you?’

  Stella’s evidence against him in his trial for Patsy’s murder had ensured his conviction. He had spent ten years in prison because of Stella, the woman who had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. As if anyone living in The Limes even knew what the truth was.

  Yes, she had walked into the hallway that day and had been open-mouthed with horror to see him kneeling next to Patsy’s body. Though she had only seen what she wanted to see – she had assumed that because he held a knife in his hand, he was responsible. Charlie was a lot of things, but he’d never been a killer.

  In his mind’s eye, he could see the wounds even now, great, savage rents spewing out torrents of blood. If he closed his eyes, it was still there, red pools of it, blossoming on the tiles like a sea of overblown poppies. Blood and more blood soaking into his clothes, clinging to the knife, puddling around his knees. The acrid, metallic tang of it still haunting his nose.

  Only one person had witnessed the truth of what happened that day. A ten-year-old kid who had epilepsy. A child who couldn’t be believed. A child who, according to her mother, was a fantasist and a drama queen. The child of a woman who had despised Charlie for years.

  Valerie had described Rachel as a problem child to the police, a problem child with an inappropriate crush on an older man. Valerie had blamed herself of course, telling them that it was her fault that Rachel followed Charlie around like a lap dog. As a witness, she had told the jury she hadn’t realised it was a problem until Rachel was prepared to bend the truth for him and cover up his crime. To think that it had gone so far that her child was prepared to lie for him!

  Valerie had turned out an Oscar-winning performance as she’d told the twelve good citizens that she saw Rachel’s weaknesses as an indictment of her own poor parenting. She had testified that Charlie was a devious and charming man, and she had no doubt he had coerced Rachel into falsely defending him.

  All Rachel had told them was that Charlie had pulled the knife out, not stuck it in, and that he had found Patsy there, in the hall, after she had been stabbed. The police had said that she would, wouldn’t she? The child was terrified of Charlie Jones, so of course she would lie. The jury had shaken their heads at the picture Valerie had painted for them and had looked at her with a mixture of pity and disdain.

  Perhaps, that was where it all really began for Charlie. That single moment when he’d realised that the only person in the world who truly trusted him had been Rachel, a geeky ten-year-old kid.

  ***

  Now the adult Rachel watched Charlie warily; that muscle in his jaw was tensing.
A bad sign that meant he was in a place where no one else was invited. It was difficult for Rachel to remember a time when she hadn’t felt some form of love for him. An image of Charlie’s smile was one of her oldest memories. Charlie had never brushed her off, never told her to go away, never told her to be quiet and stop pestering. Back then he been like a big brother, fourteen years her senior and awe-inspiringly estimable in her eyes.

  When Delia was working in the house Charlie could often be found in the garden, hacking at the undergrowth in a vain attempt to abate its creeping bid for dominance. Then in later years, when he had begun working for Roy and had started to bring the lascivious Patsy with him to The Limes, he had always, without fail, spared time to say something nice to Rachel. What a pitiful little kid she must have been, so grateful for such meagre crumbs and hero-worshipping the cleaner’s boy because he had been kind.

  Frances had been the one with the real crush, but Charlie either hadn’t seen the looks she gave him, or hadn’t noticed the efforts she made. Frances had even tried to emulate Patsy, by plastering on make-up and cutting off her skirts, until Valerie had slapped her face and called her a slut. She had backed off then, and had treated Charlie with condescending contempt ever since. His conviction for the murder Rachel knew he hadn’t committed had made Valerie’s day.

  Rachel had been the first one into the hall the day Patsy died. She had raced away from Stella, running up the drive and into the house, panting for breath, cheeks rosy from the chill winter air. The hall had been strangely silent, as if time was holding its breath as she had hung her scarf and coat on the hallstand. Only when she had turned towards the kitchen had her mouth sagged open and her feet turned to lead. Patsy had been lying on the floor in a crumpled, bloody heap. A blood-streaked bubble of spit popping on her lipstick-slicked mouth as the life ebbed out of her.

  Rachel had been transfixed, rooted to the spot. When Charlie had strolled into the hall from the kitchen, immediately issuing a guttural, almost primeval cry at the sight of his broken wife, he had thrown himself down onto the floor, instinctively pulling the knife from her chest, staring in horror as a pool of blood crept silently, still warm, towards his knees.

  Though she could picture it vividly, Rachel couldn’t remember how many minutes the old grandfather clock had marked before Stella walked through the door and something other than death had begun to happen. It had felt like an aeon.

  Charlie maintained that he had walked into the back of the house having come from the park, using the small gate that gave the residents of The Limes private access. However, there were no witnesses. The prosecution postulated that Charlie could have been in the house for any amount of time. No one else was in, so no one could corroborate his story. No one except Rachel, but her evidence was inadmissible and at best purely circumstantial. Ten-year-old children were not reliable witnesses.

  Rachel knew Charlie hadn’t stabbed Patsy. She had heard that cry. It echoed in her memory like the sound of nails being dragged slowly down a blackboard – a screeching, penetrating sound that made every fibre of her being sing with pain. Most of all it was the memory of the hollow devastation in his eyes that assured her of his innocence both then and now.

  If she told him now, told him the true reason she had walked away from him and Amy, she would see that look again. Not just the shadow of it reflected back at her when she looked into his eyes, but a full-blown re-creation of the moment his world had fallen apart for the first time.

  Patsy. The woman who had brought them together, and the woman who still stood between them.

  Patsy had been a magical creature, the only person Rachel remembered in colour. On the rare occasions she allowed herself to look back at her childhood, everyone else either appeared in black and white, or materialised as a faded, jaded representation of their younger selves.

  The Seventies had been like that: dull, and leached of colour. But Patsy had been vibrant and alive, like a bird of paradise among a flock of lesser creatures. When Patsy was in a room she’d had the effect of magnifying everyone else’s mundanity. Stella had become smaller and dowdier; Valerie became more pinched and bitter and even more like an indignant bird of prey than had been usual. Frances’s arrogance became whiningly petulant and Roy had puffed himself up like the peacock he pretended to be.

  Rachel had felt even more insignificant in Patsy’s presence, like a drab cuckoo chick in a borrowed nest. Only Charlie hadn’t changed. Charlie never changed.

  Rachel’s thoughts were still consumed with the memory of Patsy lying on the hall floor like road kill when Charlie finally broke the silence. ‘So here we are, pulled together again by your damned family. Like always eh? And you haven’t even asked me about your daughter. Remember her? Amy – in case you’ve forgotten. For what it’s worth she thinks you’re dead. I never had the heart to put her straight and tell her she wasn’t wanted and you walked away towards the money. Her life’s been hard enough without having to know her mother is a bitch. I guess you’re just like the rest of them.’

  She tried to speak, but the prickling had started in her head again, making her brain feel like an over-shaken Coke.

  ‘Oh that’s it, have another fit – opt out again why don’t you? It’s what you do best.’

  The venom in his words was pulsing through her like liquid fire – she deserved every ounce of it. She would take it and take it again rather than tell him the truth. He was hurt enough. ‘I’m sorry, can’t help it, so sorry,’ she mumbled, already slurring.

  ***

  When the seizure had abated, and Rachel lay once again in a deep sleep, Charlie rifled through her bag, found her medication, and saw that the day’s dose had been taken. He looked in her purse and found a card with the name and contact number of her neurologist, and made the call. All the while feeling like an utter bastard for losing it with her.

  Mr Parnell, consultant neurologist and Rachel’s doctor for the past nineteen years, was deeply concerned that her epilepsy had intensified so dramatically. He needed to see her – soon. Could Charlie bring her back to London as soon as possible?

  Charlie didn’t have a choice; there wasn’t anyone else who could take her and he hardly had a solid reputation for dealing with wifely welfare. Besides, everyone was better off if she went back to London – especially Amy. Of all the things that Rachel had brought back with her – memories, regrets, hurt, confusion – the threat to Amy was the worst of them. If she found out that her mother was alive she would never forgive him, or her grandmother.

  Christ – he’d spent years taking her to a bloody graveyard once a year to put flowers on some complete stranger’s grave just to maintain the lie that Rachel had died. Thank God for common names. He should never have allowed the lie to stand, but his mother had convinced him it was for the best. He’d been so angry and so hurt by Rachel leaving he’d gone along with it, like an idiot, like a sad and stupid man.

  He looked down at the sleeping woman, unsure of how he felt now – guilty mostly. He had bullied her and caused the fit. But angry too, still angry, still confused, still hurt.

  Chapter 7

  By the time Rachel woke up, groggy and hung over from the overactive neurotransmissions that were determined to destabilize her brain, Charlie had packed her bag, paid her bill, and was waiting – keys in hand – to drive her back to London. She couldn’t have looked more relieved if she’d tried. He was relieved too, but her eagerness to leave stung a little. Damn his bloody head! His thoughts were making no sense.

  The drive to London was silent and strained. Charlie didn’t say much and Rachel spent the journey with her head resting against the window, eyes closed against the overhead lights that blurred and streaked across the evening sky as they sped past.

  Charlie let her rest, figuring it was better just to keep his thoughts to himself. He didn’t want to trigger off another fit, not in the van, and she’d made it clear she wasn’t willing to talk about the past. He had debated phoning his mother to tell her he wa
sn’t going to be calling round that night, but two things stopped him. If Delia knew he was with Rachel she would probably blow a gasket and the last thing he wanted to have to deal with was his mother having a stroke on top of everything else. Besides, at fifty-two years of age it was hardly necessary to call his mother and check in.

  The second reason was Amy. He just couldn’t contemplate having to explain why he’d been such a shit dad and lied to her for her whole life. He’d stayed out before. It needn’t be a big deal if he just played it cool.

  He glanced at Rachel, and tried to work out what on earth he was feeling. Any other man would have just walked away and disappeared, but not him. What kind of mug was he? He must be some kind of masochist, going back for more. She was the woman who had just about broken him, but she was also the woman who had given him the most precious thing he had – their daughter. Amy was all grown up and looking far too much like Rachel than was good for his mental health, and still believing that her daddy was her hero. Her daddy felt like a coward and knew he was a liar.

  Not that anyone had ever stated Rachel’s supposed death as a fact; it had been something Amy had assumed. There was a vague memory of her asking Delia about it. Amy would have been about five, had just started school, and she had asked outright if her mummy was dead. Some snotty-nosed kid in her class had said that if she didn’t have a mum it must be because her mum had died.

  Delia had heard these innocent words and had looked at him, raising her eyebrows as if that unknown kid had presented them with the perfect solution. Then she had soberly lied and told Amy that, yes, her mummy was dead.

  Charlie had never had the guts to disabuse her of the notion. His mother had been right; it had been an easy solution at the time. Even though he’d had to search the county’s cemetery records to find a grave with the same bloody name when Amy had asked at age ten if she could take flowers for her mother. It had been excruciating, standing by the grave of some other R. Jones and watching his little girl put flowers there and tell her mummy what had happened at school that week. He’d felt like the worst scumbag on earth.