by Knight, Ali
‘He had you at the end, Darren, Carly just had the Witch,’ Mum sobbed.
‘Melanie please, let’s think about Chester,’ Andy said.
That’s what his mum called Olivia Duvall: the Witch. Her real name was never mentioned. What the Witch did to Carly, what the Witch was watching on telly, how the Witch could sleep – that was how his mum always referred to her.
His mum wiped her face with the heel of her hand and came and knelt next to Darren by the dog basket.
‘Can you shut his eyes?’ she asked. Darren reached across Chester’s nose and got his eyes shut. ‘Do you think it was a heart attack?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He was walking along like normal and then he sat down by the kerb. He was struggling to breathe. He was moaning and then he slumped over.’ So much detail. He could describe every little step in the sequence; there was no guessing, no filling in the blanks with horrid speculations. Hanging over all of them was the contrast to the great yawning chasm of information about what had happened to Carly.
‘God I’ll miss you, Chester,’ Darren said. They had a quiet moment, the three of them, there on the floor with Chester’s body. Darren put his arm round his mother’s shoulders. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t seeing the dog, he knew she wasn’t. Her eyes showed the fervour of ten years of intense prayers that had never been answered and never would be now. She wanted her daughter back. ‘Mum, we’ll do anything you want. You can decide. How do you want to bury him?’
Melanie suddenly found some strength and stood up tall. ‘I’ll tell you what I want.’ She glared at him and Andy as if they were at fault somehow. ‘I want to stand here in this garden, with my daughter by my side, and I want her to look down on the body of her dog, because she is living and he is dead. I want us to stand here as a family.’
Andy and Darren glanced at each other and then away. Darren felt the impotence settle on him like a wet coat, the torment of the unanswered questions, the feeling that he could have done more, that he should have tried harder to find his sister.
Living back home since his course had finished had made him realise how stuck his mum was – how stuck all of them were. Mum and Dad were stunted by their grief. He needed to grab life by the throat, but he was burdened by a sister whose own life had been cut brutally short. He felt trapped by the weight of his mum’s false dreams, of her deluded hope, and of his dad’s drink habit – he kept finding bottles of spirits secreted in the recycling bin and crushed beer cans hidden under newspapers.
Andy took Melanie to go and lie down. Darren got the shovel from the shed and dug a hole in the corner of the garden by the dead bush no one had bothered to remove last year. His dad came out and stood around pushing at the soil with his boots. Darren watched him. ‘You OK?’
Andy looked back at the house. ‘It’s a good thing you’re here, Darren, things have been tough recently.’
‘Don’t be hard on yourself, the breast cancer diagnosis is a big thing to take on board.’
He nodded, distracted, looking back at the house to make sure Melanie wasn’t in a position to hear them. ‘I’m worried, Darren, really worried.’
Alarm spiked up Darren’s back. ‘Is the diagnosis worse than I’ve been told?’
Dad shook his head and struggled for words. ‘No, it’s not that. I’m sorry, Darren, but I’m finding it impossible lately. She hasn’t got over Carly. Her grief hasn’t gone away, it’s worse if anything. I can’t live with it, Darren.’ Darren stopped digging. ‘She needs to accept that Carly is dead. That she’s never coming back.’ Once Dad had started he couldn’t stop. ‘My life is a daily battle to keep her mood up, but what’s that doing to me, Darren? She won’t go and see a professional to work through it. Instead there’s a procession of clairvoyants and Tarot readers and priests and shamans coming to the house and fleecing her of our money, preying on her weakness and vulnerability.’
Dad kicked the mound of mud in frustration. ‘She never asks what I want. I’ll tell you now, Darren, what I want. I want Carly’s bones, so I can end this thing. I want your mum to stare at those bones, so she can accept, grieve and move on. Carly is gone. And she’s never coming back. Because, Darren, if she doesn’t accept it, it’s me who’s going to be gone.
‘And this fiasco with the prison visit, nothing was ever going to come of that. You knew it, so did everyone else. She spent months with lawyers writing endless letters, buoying herself up for meeting the Witch, and she was simply humiliated. I’m forty-eight years old, Darren, there are decades of life still to live, and I want to live them well, even though my beloved daughter is gone. And I owe it to you. You are young, you have your whole life in front of you.’
Darren crouched down by Chester’s grave, by the pile of London clay he’d dug, the hard brown streaks marbled with black topsoil, and said a silent prayer. For years he had prayed that Carly would be found, that she would walk, like a miracle on water, shimmering and bright, back into their lives. Now he prayed for something different. He prayed that he could find Carly’s remains. Banish his dad’s bottles and his mum’s false hope.
Darren studied his mud-encrusted hands, the black curve of dirt under his fingernails. Since he had come back home from college he had been aware of the increasing distance between his parents and his low-level panic was now beginning to feel forceful. It was a double abandonment. Mum had endured a complicated birth with Carly that had forced her to subsequently have a hysterectomy. His parents had always told him that this trauma had been a gift – they had adopted him, loved him and brought him up as their own. They were the only family he had, but now it felt as though it was all falling apart and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.
3
They buried Chester in the garden at sunset, wrapped in his blanket. They cried together as a family, acknowledging that there was another funeral they had never had, for a girl they had lost and who they wanted back so much.
After the improvised service, Mum and Dad said they were going to Melanie’s sister’s and Darren encouraged them to go – he was desperate to smoke a joint and float away from his cares for a while.
Once they’d left he took the stairs two at a time and lay on his bed and let the marijuana pull him away from his worries. Wandering out of his bedroom again and past his parents’, he noticed the cardboard box half pulled out from under the bed. It was the box about his sister’s abduction. Inside were press cuttings, magazine articles, police reports, victim support letters, sympathy cards from the public. The box should have been put away in the attic, Darren thought, but Mum had kept it here, right under her head. She had slept surrounded by it all for the last ten years.
Dad was right, it was infecting her, radiating its bad karma, probably causing the cells to mutate in her breast with the grief. It was no accident that those cells lay over her heart, Darren thought, feeling stoned now. He sat down cross-legged by the box and began looking through it. He found pictures of his mum looking shockingly young, his dad standing next to her, photos of all five women and girls and the one photo of Olivia Duvall, used over and over again. She was very ugly, with one side of her face enlarged and one eye half closed. She had short, dark hair. She fitted perfectly the image of the ‘freak of nature’ killer that the press and the public wanted her to be.
He found the police reports into the case. He started to read them again, but began to feel ill and put the paper down.
Olivia was tried for all five murders together. The trial was controversial; none of the bodies had been found, but there were scraps of physical evidence at her house: a tiny torn section of a pair of Isla’s pants in the cellar, a hairband belonging to another girl, trapped behind a radiator, two strands of dark hair clinging to the elastic, the blood and the bone fragments in the garden …
Darren swallowed and tried to concentrate. Olivia’s house and garden were taken apart so thoroughly by Sussex Police there was nothing left of them by the time they’d finished. The house was later dem
olished.
Olivia accepted she was guilty, baldly said she’d murdered all five and never said another word. She had never revealed what she’d done to them, or where she’d put the bodies. She showed no remorse, had no understanding of what she had inflicted on the victims or their families and was judged to be legally insane. She was sentenced to life with no opportunity for parole and had been sent at first to a high-security hospital in the Midlands, but been moved three years later to Roehampton, a secure psychiatric hospital in south-west London.
He had been eleven when Carly had disappeared. She had been fourteen.
He pushed the box back under the bed.
He went back into his bedroom and lay down, computer games boxes cascading onto the pairs of trainers on the floor. He picked up his laptop and looked up Olivia’s name on Google. There were 1,753 million results. They tended to fall into distinct categories: articles denouncing the freak of nature that she was – how someone trained as a social worker to save and improve the lives of the disadvantaged could terminate them so coldly; campaigners who claimed she was innocent, her confession the misjudged ramblings of a disordered mind; the smaller numbers who believed that she hadn’t acted alone, that a man must have been pulling the strings behind her. The newest search results covered the attempts by the other families to get her to reveal where she had put their daughters’ remains, led by Orin Bukowski, Isla’s father, and his pressure group, The Missing. Under Google Images he found a succession of photos of Orin and a small group of protestors from The Missing climbing the outer wall of Roehampton Hospital to highlight Olivia’s lenient treatment. They’d unfurled a banner saying ‘Victims must come first’, and stayed on the wall for seventeen hours. They were applauded by the press for their show of defiance.
He typed ‘Roehampton Hospital’ into the search engine and looked at the low, red-brick buildings that seemed conspicuously free of high-security features; lots of green lawn and saplings. It looked like a place celebrities checked into and wore fluffy bathrobes as they dried out, rather than somewhere murderers and violent psychopaths went to be punished. He clicked through some more pages, read the biogs of the staff, saw the smiling faces of the directors. He looked at the place on Google Earth, zooming in and out again. He felt angry. The Witch had ended up on Easy Street, had a view with no barbed wire. She was probably enjoying herself – watching TV and taking self-improvement classes. He saw her in his mind in a sun-filled room, a pencil in her hand, a life drawing class in progress, hiding a sly grin of victory. An image of his mum begging her for scraps of information about a beloved daughter, debasing herself even though she was ill … The drumbeat of rage in his skull began to reach a crescendo and he sucked on his joint with quivering hands.
He clicked on a link that said ‘Job opportunities’. They were asking for a facilities manager, a financial controller, IT workers and cleaners.
He heard the front door opening and shut his computer in a hurry, as if what he was looking at was shameful.
Darren woke in the night with a start, a bad dream chasing him awake. He could hear low, urgent voices from the room next door. Mum and Dad were arguing, her voice reedy in the night. He turned to the wall and put his pillow over his head, but he still couldn’t block it out.
4
The next morning his mum was black in her mood, pacing the kitchen.
‘What time you call this to get up?’ She was on a war footing. ‘I don’t know why you think you can lounge around here all day, you need a job, Darren. J. O. B. Or paint the front of the house, put your degree to good use.’
Darren put his cup of tea down. ‘I got a fine art degree, Mum! It doesn’t mean I’m any good at painting the house!’
‘Too proud to get stuck in, that’s your generation. And cut your hair. Painting the house is the only thing you can do – no one’d hire you looking like that anyway.’
Darren rubbed his blond Rasta locks protectively. ‘Leave me alone!’ He stomped out of the kitchen and back towards his room.
‘And I don’t want you smoking your gear in the house, d’you hear me!’ she called after him.
He flopped down on the bed. He felt bad; she was ill and scared and he needed to be supportive, but he just wanted, for one day, to wake up and have a cuppa in peace. Living back at home was turning into a nightmare. He traced the knots and twists of his once vaguely curly hair with his fingers. He had left it for years uncombed and uncut, and it had twisted in and around on itself until it was a mass of shoulder length dreadlocks, lightened to blond by the sun and the salt water from the surfing he enjoyed. He had stopped cutting it when Carly disappeared, promising himself he would go to a barber when she came back. Ten years later, he still hadn’t touched it. And now he couldn’t, because he was more like his mum than he cared to admit – he was superstitious, and cutting it off would mean too many things, none of them positive.
In the creative bubble that was art school he hadn’t really thought about his hair, but back home in the real world he realised it served a purpose: he was shy and he hid underneath it.
He picked up his laptop, lifted the lid and found it still open on the Roehampton website page from last night. He took a deep lungful of smoke, feeling the ends of his fingers become numb.
The job vacancies swam in his vision. No one cared what a cleaner looked like, he thought. His hair wouldn’t be a disadvantage. He picked up his mobile and dialled before he had thought through what he was doing.
After he had chosen options on a menu and endured some lame classical music, a woman answered.
‘I’m calling about a cleaning job I saw on the website.’
‘Hold on a minute please.’ She put him through and after a few rings a man answered.
‘I’m phoning about a cleaning—’
He was cut off before he could finish. ‘Email in a CV. You’ll need previous experience.’ The voice had an accent Darren couldn’t place.
‘Of what?’
There was a pause, a sharp intake of breath. ‘What do you mean, of what? Cleaning.’
‘Oh, yeah, I see.’ Damn. He’d never worked as a cleaner. ‘I’ve worked in a pub, does that count? I’ve cleaned the glasses, wiped the counter and stuff.’
‘Toilets?’
‘Yeah, you’re right, sorry I forgot, I did that too.’
‘Of course, everyone wants to forget that. You need to have the right to work in the country.’
‘That’s all OK, I’m English.’
‘What you want, a medal? You need a DBS check.’
‘A what?’
‘Disclosure and Barring Service. It’s the new CRB. They’re in chaos, surprise, surprise. Their checks are taking ages. You need proof of ID. If you can’t provide all that, original documents, don’t bother applying.’
‘Er, OK.’
‘Who’s your friend here?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Who do you know who already works here?’
‘Oh, I don’t know anyone there already.’ There was the first pause, Darren fancied, of suspicion. ‘I’m moving in with my girlfriend and she lives nearby.’ He was surprised how easily the lie tripped out.
‘Can you start straight away?’
‘I guess.’
The man barked out his email address, said his name was Kamal.
‘Kamal what?’ Darren asked.
‘There’s only one of me,’ the man said, and put the phone down.
Darren lay back and smoked the rest of the joint. The day ahead of him existed in great acres of unformed time. He was out of sorts and there was no Chester to walk.
The phone call was ridiculous, a mania brought on by Chester’s death, by his warring parents, his sick mum being humiliated by Olivia Duvall.
And then there was the insurmountable problem about who he was. A victim’s brother, trying to get a job at the facility where her killer was housed! He wouldn’t get within a hundred feet of the place.
He lay back on the bed, drop
ped the tab into a wooden cannon he’d made in A level Art and looked at the preliminary studies of a series of paintings that covered his bedroom wall. He groaned, realising the absurdity of what he had just done, but he couldn’t let it go. A few minutes later, he changed the surname on his CV and pinged it to Kamal, and promptly fell fast asleep.
5
The next afternoon Darren was in the bath, a joint in one hand, trying to shove his toe up the tap. It was midweek, Mum was laid out on the sofa cushions in the living room; the pills she was taking were robbing her of energy and any desire to eat. Dad was at work. His mobile rang with a blocked-number message. He answered it.
‘Is this Mr Smith?’
‘Wrong number.’ Darren put the phone back down on the porcelain.
A moment later it rang again. ‘I’m looking for Darren Smith. It’s Roehampton High-Security Hospital.’
Darren sat up sharply, sending a wave of water over the side of the tub. ‘Er, yeah. That’s me.’ His pulse was racing. He had forgotten that Smith was the name he’d put on the application form when he was stoned.
There was a long, tense pause.
‘It’s Kamal. Can you come for an interview on Friday?’
‘Friday?’
‘It’s the day after Thursday,’ Kamal said, not hiding the sarcasm. Darren wanted to say no. He wanted to scream it, that it had all been a mistake. ‘Come Friday at ten. Remember your documents.’
All Darren could think of to say was, ‘OK.’
Kamal hung up without saying goodbye.
‘Darren, stop slopping water over the side of the bath!’ Mum was yelling from downstairs. ‘It’s dripping through the ceiling!’
