My Mother, the Liar

by Ann Troup

  All she got in response was the dull thunk of the machine. Angie knew she shouldn’t be there. She should be following up on the information Pam and her mother had given her, working out the links between Delia Jones and Valerie Porter. More to the point, working out the link between Delia and Charlie.

  If what Pam had told her was true, there was no way that Charlie could be Delia’s son, so who was he and how did he fit into the picture? Decisively she stood. Sod this – there was no way she was hanging around in a hospital for nothing. Ratcliffe could bawl her out later if he wanted; besides, there were plenty of staff in the ICU, so it was hardly likely that anything would happen to Rachel any time soon. Angie decided that it was worth the risk, and left.

  To her relief, as soon as she switched her phone on, there was a message from Ratcliffe telling her she was free to leave. She headed back to the station only to find that Ratcliffe had buggered off to get his car cleaned and had left Haddon to fill her in on the interview with Frances.

  She sat at her desk and mulled over what she had just been told. It sounded like a complete fantasy designed to divert attention away from Frances. But Angie already had suspicions about Delia, and decided a little more checking wouldn’t go amiss. She fired up her computer, found the screen she needed, and typed in the name Barrington Jones.

  ***

  ‘What’s so special about you?’

  Rachel heard the question, but couldn’t for the life of her work out where it was coming from. She appeared to be in a waiting room, dressed in a hospital gown. There was some reason she was there, but she couldn’t remember it. Though the room she was in was bare to the point of starkness, it was strangely peaceful. If she wanted to, it felt as though she could just drift off to sleep and be peaceful for ever. So nice, so tempting.

  Somewhere outside the room, there was noise and activity, but she didn’t need to worry about it. It didn’t have anything to do with her; she was just waiting. However, the question that had floated through the air bothered her. There was nothing special about her, nothing at all. No point to her existence, in fact. But she guessed whoever had asked the question already knew that, was being rhetorical.

  What was it she was waiting for?

  Chapter 37

  Amy reached her grandmother’s house and was surprised to find that she couldn’t get in. Strange that Delia hadn’t mentioned that she was going out. Nevertheless with a confident shrug she lifted up the garden gnome that hid the spare key and let herself in.

  The kitchen was a mess, the crockery from breakfast still languishing on the table. The fridge was wide open, the milk on its side slowly dripping onto the floor. Someone had ripped open a box of teabags and had just let them spill all over the floor, and loose sugar glittered the worktops like early morning frost. Amy had never seen Delia’s house in such a state, and it made her panic.

  ‘Gran?’ she called, running through to the next room expecting to find her grandmother collapsed somewhere with a broken hip or something. The mess in the lounge was even worse than the kitchen. Broken china and glass lay everywhere, as if someone had taken a baseball bat to all the ornaments and swept them from their shelves in a fit of violence. Drawers lay open, their contents spilling on the floor, the cushions on the sofa had been slashed, their foamy innards disgorged. Adrenaline coursed through Amy’s body as she surged through the rest of the house, convinced that she would find Delia beaten and bloody somewhere.

  The house was empty.

  Frantic with fear, Amy dialled 999, sure that the house had been burgled. Gran would go ape shit – all her things were trashed. God knows how Amy would tell her. She waited, agitated, while she was put through to the police. The calm female voice on the end of the phone wanted to know if anything had been taken. It was such a mess that Amy found it hard to tell. The obvious things were still there, the TV was present, though it had been tipped over, and Delia’s jewellery was scattered all over the bedroom. It didn’t look like anything had been stolen at all. Just wrecked.

  The woman wanted to know if there were any signs of forced entry, but Amy had had to use a key to get in and all the windows were shut and unbroken. She was advised to go and sit with a neighbour until the police turned up, but she didn’t fancy tea and questions from anyone just then. She just wanted to find Delia and phone her dad. Charlie’s phone cut straight to the answer service, meaning he was probably at the hospital and had switched it off. When she tried Delia’s phone she heard it ringing from somewhere under the debris in the sitting room. She had an overwhelming urge to sit down and cry. She had no idea what on earth she should do.

  Feeling frightened and alone she half sat, half leaned on the edge of a shredded armchair, clutching her phone and praying that Charlie would ring. The woman at the control centre had told her not to touch anything in the house, but it was difficult to just sit amidst the chaos and do nothing but wait.

  Who on earth would do this to an old lady’s home?

  Everything that represented Delia was gone. Smashed and ruined. A whole life trashed in the blink of an eye. It felt like a whirlwind had whipped through the house and turned it upside down. Everyone knew that Delia loved junk, but to see it all shattered like this just made it look all the more ridiculous and tawdry. Headless kittens, limbless glass clowns, an eye here, a tail there, photographs torn apart in a frenzy. China dolls, grotesquely disfigured by the destruction, their faces chipped and cracked, their dresses torn. Now that it was all broken, it had taken on a sinister feel. There was a creeping doom about the place that Amy started to find disquieting.

  Instinctively she got up and picked her way back through the mess, deciding to wait for the police outside, where the air was cleaner and she could shake off the sense of impending threat.

  The gnome that hid the key grinned up at her with big Disney eyes. It made her shudder so she kicked it, figuring one more broken thing wouldn’t make much difference today.

  ***

  Just as Pam’s mother had said, Barrington Jones had been a pimp. He was well known to the police and before his death, wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of Molly Kerr and her son. Molly had been working for him, and had been reported missing by one of his other girls. No trace of her or the child had ever been found, and when they had finally caught up with Barrington he was beyond giving any account of himself. He was found in an alley, his body bloated with drugs and his skull caved in.

  Technically the case was still open, but no one bothered too much about pimps and whores, especially back then. The loss of Barrington Jones had been a good thing for the town, and one less whore and her kid was no great loss to anyone if the attitudes of the time were to be believed.

  Angie found no record of him ever marrying Delia – or of Delia ever marrying anyone for that matter. She had just taken his name and become another anonymous-sounding Jones. It also seemed like she had just melted away into the ether for a year or so afterwards. Just like the other women who had worked for Jones.

  The next time Delia had popped up was over a year after, with a three-year-old child in tow. The people she had associated with back then had loose morals, loose tongues, and unfortunately loose memories too. No one had cared that Delia had acquired a child of three; the only thing that had mattered to Delia’s old associates was where their next drink was coming from. Besides, Delia had become respectable, so what was she to them any more?

  Angie had found most of this out from a retired officer who had worked the case. She had tracked him down to his allotment and had shared a cup of tea with him in his potting shed while they talked over old times. He had been amused by her interest in a case that had only received cursory attention at the time. His attitude had been that sometimes it was better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  She had asked him what he had thought of Delia back then. He had laughed and referred to her as a hard-faced cow. Delia’s career on the game had been brief, and she hadn’t caused them too much trouble as he recal
led. Somehow, the picture didn’t tally with the cuddly granny image presented by Delia now.

  Angie had asked him if they had ever considered that Charlie Jones might be the son of Molly Kerr. He’d shrugged, mulled it over, and asked her if it really mattered any more. Angie had thanked him for his time and made her exit, deciding that it mattered a great deal.

  ***

  She got back to the station just in time to find Ratcliffe extracting himself from an extremely small courtesy car. ‘Don’t you dare laugh, Watson!’ he huffed as she approached him.

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, sir. Want to know what I’ve been doing while you’ve been playing in your Noddy car?’

  While she was filling him in on her day’s work, a memo was placed on his desk, informing them that Delia’s house had been the target of an apparent burglary. A computer programme had flagged up the name and address, linking it to their case.

  A conversation with the uniformed officers who had attended told them that nothing had been taken and that there were no signs of forced entry to the property.

  ‘What the hell?’ Ratcliffe asked as he put down the phone. ‘Are we really considering that a seventy-seven-year-old woman is a serial killer who is still active?’ he asked Angie, looking as though he was sincerely hoping that she was going to firmly disabuse him of the notion.

  Angie nodded slowly and watched him sigh heavily and hold his head in his hands. ‘I don’t effing believe this,’ he said through his fingers. ‘So where the hell is she now? According to uniform she hasn’t been back to the house all day.’

  Angie shrugged, and then realisation dawned. ‘Why exactly did you make me stay at the hospital earlier, boss?’

  Ratcliffe waved his hand dismissively. ‘Some stupid deal I had with Frances Haines to get her to talk, a precaution really. She was convinced Rachel was at risk because of what happened to Stella …’ His words trailed off and he shot out of his chair. ‘Shit, she was telling the truth!’ he yelled.

  Angie was already walking towards the door.

  ***

  Charlie had left Diana in the hospital canteen, claiming that he needed some fresh air and to stretch his legs. Besides, he needed to put another ticket on the van – which reminded him that he’d thrown the London parking ticket into the foot-well. He ought to retrieve it and sort it out before the fine escalated. Anything to distract him from the oppression of sitting next to Rachel’s bed feeling as though he was waiting for her to die. Instead he’d left his mother there. She could deal with these situations better than anyone.

  It had been a long time since he had wanted to cry. The last time had been the day after Rachel had left, when the shock and anger had subsided and the sense of rejection had set in. Now she was threatening to leave them again and he just didn’t think he could take it. Not that he would blame her if she just gave up the fight but it would break him all over again.

  Wearily he bent down to rummage in the van, groping under the seat for the screwed-up ticket. His hand found something unexpected. It felt like a small book. Confused he pulled it out, sure that it didn’t belong to him. It looked like a diary, an old one, the binding worn, the small brass catch that held it shut scuffed and tarnished. He vaguely remembered seeing it in Rachel’s bag at the hotel, but hadn’t paid much attention to it. He figured that she must have dropped it in the van when he’d taken her back to London.

  Dare he look inside, find out what she had written over the years they’d been apart, or was he better off not knowing?

  He weighed it in his hand. It smelled of damp and dust and the thick stench of old secrets that he was never meant to be privy to. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, he felt repulsed by it, as if the weight of the past might be contained in its pages ready to consume them all. Melodramatic thought that was. He tossed the thing onto the seat, glad to be rid of it. He would give it to Rachel later. If she ever woke up.

  He figured he had better check his phone whilst he was out of the hospital. God knows how much work he had lost in the last few days because of all this. The number of missed calls from Amy sent a cold chill through his gut.

  What else was life going to chuck at them? Hadn’t they had enough?

  The message service connected him to Amy’s panicked voice, telling him that his mother was missing and that someone had trashed her house. Immediately he rang Amy’s number. She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Dad! Did you get my messages? We can’t find Gran. I don’t know where she’s gone and the house is a mess. The police just left me here and I don’t know what to do!’ She sobbed.

  ‘Wait there, I’m on my way,’ he said, ramming his keys into the van’s ignition before he had even ended the call.

  By the time he pulled up outside his mother’s house, the police were back. Lots of them. Amy was outside sobbing her heart out, being comforted by a female PC who was plying her with tissues. Another was keeping the neighbours back. People in white paper suits were walking in and out of the house with what looked like evidence bags. ‘Amy! What the hell is going on?’ he shouted, half pushing the policewoman out of the way to get to her.

  ‘Dad, thank God. They came back just as I was waiting for you, but no one will tell me what’s happening. Something bad has happened to Gran, hasn’t it?’ she sobbed, clutching at him.

  Someone waved a warrant card in front of his face. ‘DC Haddon. Would you mind coming with me, Mr Jones? We have some questions.’

  ‘Oh my God, you can’t arrest my dad!’ Amy shrieked hysterically, throwing herself in front of Charlie.

  Haddon smiled. ‘I’m not arresting anyone, but I do need to ask some questions. All we are going to do is sit in the car and talk for a minute. OK?’

  Charlie didn’t cope well in such situations. Being forced to sit in the back of a police car, even without handcuffs, was stressful. In his experience the police rarely listened to reason and in these situations acted like hounds with the scent of blood in their noses.

  Haddon slid into the front seat and turned to him with a smile that Charlie assumed was meant to be reassuring. It wasn’t; it just made him want to punch the smug bastard. ‘Do you know the whereabouts of your mother, Mr Jones?’ Haddon asked.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not able to tell you that at this point, but we do need to know where we can find her. It’s extremely important.’

  Charlie wanted to mull it over, wanted a chance to work out what might be happening here, but he knew that the more he stalled, the worse it would look. ‘She’s at the hospital, visiting my wife. Are you going to tell me what’s going on now?’

  ‘Just a moment, sir,’ Haddon said, climbing out of the car and moving swiftly towards a colleague, who nodded at him and pulled out his radio. Charlie strained to listen but couldn’t hear anything. Haddon brought Amy over to the car. ‘Please wait here with your father, miss. I’ll be back shortly to let you know what’s happening.’

  Bemused, Amy sat next to her father in the police car and stared out at the scene.

  Chapter 38

  Rachel awoke abruptly; still in the waiting room but aware that she was no longer alone. A familiar figure stood over her. ‘Delia? What are you doing here?’ she asked, puzzled.

  Delia wasn’t smiling. ‘It’s time that you were gone,’ she said, but her voice was distant, as if she was speaking through a long tube.

  ‘Where am I going to go?’ Rachel asked, still sleepy, still bleary, still not with it.

  ‘Time you went where you belong, lady.’

  Rachel felt confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You just won’t give in, will you – after everything you just keep bouncing back like a bad penny. I should have done this years ago.’

  ‘Done what? What’s wrong, Delia?’

  In one brief flash, the waiting room was gone and Rachel felt herself being sucked into darkness, darkness so thick, so tangible that it felt like black velvet, folding itself about her and choking out all sense of reality.
In sheer panic she fought against it, tearing at it, pushing it away from her, struggling to breathe and sucking nothing but more and more blackness into her lungs. She was drowning in nothingness and fighting thin air.

  ***

  In all her tears of nursing on the ICU, Staff Nurse Jane Bucknall had witnessed some things, but she had never been confronted by the act of an elderly woman ripping out tubes and holding a pillow over the patient’s face. In utter shock, she found herself absently observing the event as if it couldn’t be happening – until a tall woman swept into the room, launched herself across the ward, and blatantly bashed the old woman across the back of the head with a chair.

  Then all hell broke loose.

  ***

  DC Haddon and his colleagues had patiently sifted through the debris in Delia’s house and had come up with absolutely nothing, other than the receipt of a salutary lesson in the dangers of ordering goods from Sunday supplement magazines. The general consensus was that Delia had trashed the place herself, but only God knew why.

  Frustrated, he wandered out onto the street, stood next to Charlie’s van, and rummaged in his pockets for cigarettes, managing to drop his lighter in the process. As he bent to retrieve it, something on the seat of the van caught his eye. Something that looked suspiciously like an old red diary, with a little lock.

  ***

  To Diana’s shock, the chair just bounced off the old woman, who then immediately turned around and aimed a surprisingly powerful punch to the centre of Diana’s face. The impact sent her reeling and a starburst of pain flooded her head.

  It took three nurses, two of them male, to bring Delia Jones down. And that was how Mike Ratcliffe and Angie Watson found her. Pinned to the floor, face down under the weight of a six-foot charge nurse.

  Chapter 39

  Amy opened the wardrobe and ran her hand across the satins, silks and furs. ‘My God, Dad, have you seen this? This place is like vintage heaven! These clothes must be worth a fortune. The fur is a bit dodgy though.’