by Knight, Ali
‘How so?’
‘Got a cuz at the DVLA.’ Corey looked proud.
‘Jesus, you guys are bored,’ Darren said.
Sonny took exception. ‘I’m never bored. Got my eye on the cameras twenty-four seven.’
‘You could always phone up about my pushbike.’
Sonny and Darren laughed at Corey’s expense, but as Darren looked at the car park on the monitors he remembered that John Sears always drove here to meet Olivia. Could Corey help him find out more about him? Corey was glaring at Darren, miffed that he had been the butt of their joke. Darren realised he had made a mistake laughing at Corey; he had alienated him at just the moment he wanted to ask him for a big favour.
‘I need a leak.’ Sonny got up from his seat, stretched and headed out of the room and down the corridor.
Asking Corey to check the licence plate of a car that parked where he could potentially see it on the cameras was risky, but it was a risk Darren was prepared to take. He wouldn’t be at Roehampton for much longer anyway.
‘What you want, bro?’ Corey was staring at him aggressively.
‘Can you find the details of a licence plate I give you?’
Corey’s lip curled in distaste. ‘Why would I do that for you?’
Why indeed. Darren had to conjure something that Corey cared about, something that would outrage him enough that he would go out of his way to help him. ‘It’s not for me. It’s for my mum.’ Corey didn’t respond. ‘Some toerag dented her car, swore at her, gave her the finger, then drove away. She got the licence plate but she’s hopeless with cars, hasn’t got a clue what make or model it was. Without that info the DVLA won’t help and the insurance people are washing their hands of the whole thing and she’s out of pocket. I want his name and address.’
Corey sat very still for a long moment, his face stony. Darren’s heart sank. He wasn’t going to buy it. Corey liked wielding power; being asked for favours by someone who he didn’t respect didn’t interest him. ‘Gotta get my mum’s back, one way or another, especially when she’s ill.’
Corey raised an eyebrow. ‘You think you gotta get your mum’s back.’
‘Too right. It’s a son’s job, look after your mum. One way or another, gotta put it right.’ At that moment Darren felt like crying as he thought about her and how she was suffering.
Corey began to nod, impressed. ‘You don’t mess, do you?’
Darren shook his head. ‘No. This is the plate, write it down.’
Darren could hear Sonny singing as he made his way back from the toilet. Corey picked up a pen, slowly pulled a scrap of paper towards him. Darren was desperate for him to hurry up. He read out the licence plate of John Sears’ car just before Sonny came back into the room.
Corey became defensive with his boss there. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’m not promising anything.’ He turned away and tuned back in to his job.
‘Yeah, OK,’ Darren said, and left the room to continue cleaning. He moved down the corridor with the hoover and passed Helen’s door, intending to enter the next office, but Helen was there.
‘Come in, Darren.’
‘I can come back later, I didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘No no, now is fine.’ She got up and pushed her chair back. He ran the vacuum cleaner quickly under the desk and round the outer edges.
‘Close the door.’
‘What?’
‘Close the door.’
‘The cord on the hoover …’
‘Just do it.’
She went over to the venetian blinds that covered the bank of windows next to the door and slowly tilted them closed.
He shut the door.
She sat on the edge of her desk, her skirt riding high up her thighs as she crossed her legs. ‘I’ve missed you, Darren.’
‘Helen, I don’t think this is a good idea. This is where you work, it’s not—’
‘Let’s do it, Darren, NOW.’
There was a look in her eyes that wasn’t to be ignored. He thought helplessly about Chloe, about how he wanted to have sex with her, not Helen. His evening with Helen in the pub seemed like a lifetime ago. He had already moved on.
‘I don’t have all day.’ She had got off the table and was pulling her black pants off. He could see the pale flesh at the top of her hold-ups under her skirt. ‘Fuck me like you mean it.’
Darren felt himself withering away under his uniform. No one liked to be trapped, and he was beginning to see how fruitless his attempts at using her to get to Olivia had been. She wouldn’t take rejection well.
She pulled him to her and began to kiss him. ‘I put these shoes on hoping I’d see you today. They’re killing me.’
She was grinding against him, getting frustrated. ‘Come on, use the danger, Darren. I want this to be as hard as your pecs.’ She unzipped his trousers, grabbed his dick and held it tight before sliding to her knees.
Darren felt fear and pleasure rolled into one – this brief moment of release could well be the highlight of a tortuous eight-hour cleaning shift, or it could be the end of all his efforts to find Carly if someone opened the door. Helen began to suck and his knees buckled from the sensation. His hands touched the keyboard on the desk behind Helen and the screen jumped to life.
Words jumped and swam in his vision, lists of medicines and conditions he didn’t understand. It was a patient’s file. Darren pressed the page down key and the top of a new page appeared. Olivia’s name was at the top of the file. Transfixed, he kept his finger on the key, watching Olivia’s life at Roehampton spool in front of him. The file onscreen was going back in date order; he was near the back of the file now, back at the beginning of Olivia’s life inside.
Helen came up for air and put her bum back on the desk. ‘That’s better.’ She pulled him towards her, one leg round his back. She was gasping quietly as he banged her against the desk. Helen was thrusting harder against him now, pressing her mouth into his shoulder to stop herself crying out. Now her head was lolling backwards, her hair touching his hands as he jabbed at the page down key. ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop,’ she whispered.
He was beginning to panic, his erection sliding away from him as he tried to concentrate on what he was reading. She was bucking more energetically, more desperately against him. She looked at him, forcing him to abandon the screen behind her for a moment. ‘Tell me what to do for you,’ she murmured, grabbing his bum.
He was desperately trying to attach his mind to something to bring back the hardness; he could see the frustration in Helen’s eyes as they swam in and out of focus.
‘I’m a good person,’ he mumbled.
She stopped grinding and grabbed his head with both hands. ‘You’re a good person, a very good person,’ she sighed, so close to his ear he could feel the hot breath on it.
He rammed into Helen so hard the desk shunted against the wall. All the blood in his body rushed to the right place as if he had been jabbed with a cattle prod. He felt huge, he felt white hot, omnipotent, as he held Helen against him and read the screen over her shoulder.
Olivia had a son. Born May first, 1992. Put under the care of East Sussex social services aged eighteen months and placed for adoption.
He read the paragraph below. ‘Numerous attempts have been made to get Olivia to talk about her son and his adoption. Whenever subject is raised, Olivia “shuts down”, and becomes uncommunicative. It should be noted that all attempts to allow patient to talk about this issue have failed. The significance of this event for the patient’s psychological condition is—’
Helen’s arms were flailing around above her head now; she was transported somewhere else entirely, little grunting noises beginning to rise to a scream. He clapped his hand over her mouth as she fell backwards on to the desk, pulling him with her. He lost his balance and the keyboard slid off the desk. He half picked Helen up and lowered her and himself to the floor, where she lay still, all the strength gone from her body as it flooded with ecstasy.
A few moments later Darren got off the floor, picked up the keyboard and tidied the disorder on Helen’s desk. He adjusted the blinds and stripes of white sunlight filled the room. He opened the door and pushed the hoover out into the corridor.
The corridor was empty. Helen sat with her back against the desk, eyes half closed, a flush across her chest and cheeks.
‘Darren Smith. You maniac.’
He pushed his trolley along to the lift at the far end of the hall, steadying himself for the long dull hours of cleaning ahead.
39
Olivia was gazing from across the desk at the honey tones of the skin on Helen’s cheek, the way the small shards of light from the window high up in the room shaped a shadow under her cheekbone. Her mascara had made a slight smudge under her right eye. Olivia imagined running her tongue along that dark line, tasting the salt and feeling the little spikes of clumpy product. She tipped her head to the same angle that Helen held hers. She loved mirroring what Helen did; her movements seemed delicate yet strong, like a gymnast or a dancer. Helen used both hands to smooth down her glorious hair. Olivia tried to raise hers to copy her, but the clank of her wrist restraints brought her back to earth. She felt the itchy inner fabric of the metal scrape against her ankles.
Helen was talking now. She loved listening to Helen’s voice, though she never gave the slightest indication she did so. Helen was clever and often amusing and, in the mind-numbing boredom of incarceration, Olivia’s sessions with her were a welcome break. Plus, she liked the walk down the long corridors to this room, although she had missed out on that today as she had been trussed up and pushed here in a wheelchair. This would be the new regime post-Linda, until she impressed Helen sufficiently for security to soften. She had to take her pleasures where she could get them.
Olivia watched how the light caught on the fuzz of Helen’s navy sweater. Cashmere, she judged. Her eyes roamed across Helen’s shoulder, and her eyes lost their soft-edged blur and came sharply back into focus. A thin white line of something wound up and around Helen’s shoulder, caught in the down of her sweater. Olivia looked harder. It was a long hair. Not white, but blond.
Olivia sat very still and stared, first at Helen then at the watch that poked out from beneath the three-quarter-length sleeves. Olivia had been kept waiting in this bare room, strapped into the wheelchair, because Helen had arrived late. Flustered. She studied the outline of Helen’s face, noted the flush still on her cheek, the pen that she held loosely between two fingers. Olivia bent down to scratch her ankle and looked at Helen’s shoes with the higher-than-usual heel, the seven deniers, the legs wound tightly round each other. Tightly wound to stop Darren’s passion and desire from spilling out, a failed attempt to keep her rutting a secret.
Helen stopped talking and they looked at each other in silence.
‘Having a good day, Dr McCabe?’
Olivia watched the smile spread far across Helen’s face. ‘We’re here to talk about your day, Olivia.’
She felt a tremor of something new: respect and anticipation. Darren was proving himself more adept than she had dreamed at lying and conniving.
She looked at the laptop on the desk next to Helen. As she gazed during their talks at her intent mouth, leaned forward to catch a drift of her perfume, Helen would type away furiously on that keyboard. It probably had Darren’s fingerprints on it.
‘You seem to be amused by something, do you want to tell me about that?’
Olivia smiled and shook her head.
40
‘Did Olivia ever have a kid?’
Darren saw Dad freeze with his forkful of food an inch from his mouth. They were eating dinner, chips and fish fingers and peas. Mum’s pills were killing her appetite and so she sat and watched the two men eating. Darren took a swig of beer from the can.
‘Don’t bring her up now,’ Dad said hurriedly.
Melanie looked at him for a tense moment. ‘The Witch never spawned a kid.’
‘I’m sorry I brought it up.’
Melanie took a sip of water to wash down the two pills that had been lying on the table by her plate. ‘Imagine her having a child. God what a thought.’ She shuddered, and Darren wasn’t sure if it was the pills, the cancer or the thought of Olivia having a child that had done it. ‘Imagine it walking around, living a life. Touching people.’
Darren reached over and held his mum’s hand. ‘I’m sorry I mentioned it.’
‘But more to the point, the police have told us nothing about Molly’s body. Nothing at all!’
‘I think the tests take time, they don’t want to say something if it’s not certain—’
Mum interrupted Dad with a huff. ‘That’s not true is it though? There’s a hierarchy to suffering, and we sit at the bottom. I bet Orin’s being briefed by some snitch in the department—’
‘Melanie—’
‘Mum, you’ve got to take it easy, don’t get stressed about this,’ Darren broke in.
She got up from the table, anger in her movements. ‘Talking of snitches, what have you been up to?’
She pointed a finger at Darren and he was alarmed. She had rumbled him, had discovered where he was working. He braced himself for what was coming next.
She walked to the counter where a pile of household detritus sat in a teetering pile. She threw an A4 envelope across the table at him. ‘This came for you today. By courier. Nothing about that man is subtle.’
The envelope was addressed to him. Across the top was the logo of The Missing charity with the strapline ‘Get angry, get justice, get results.’ A chain of hands encircled the logo. Sitting on top of the circle, like a bauble on a ring, was an angel. It was the combination of hard-hitting and emotional that had proved wildly successful with the public.
His heart sank.
‘Did you go and see him?’ Dad asked.
Darren pushed his plate away. ‘Yes. I wanted to understand more about what had happened back then when Carly went missing.’
His parents looked at each other.
‘You could have just asked us,’ his dad said quietly.
‘You never talk about it. It’s too painful for you.’
‘We want you to live your life, not think about that period,’ Dad said.
His mum sat opposite him, arms folded. She was less forgiving. ‘You could hardly have done worse if you’d gone and seen the Witch herself.’
‘You went to see her!’
‘It was a mistake. I wish I’d never done it. She’s just evil. But don’t be seduced by Orin. There are lots of people who want to hang on your grief, who want to profit from it. As if losing Carly wasn’t enough, you become a magnet for other people’s agendas. You can’t even trust your friends any more.’
Darren put his finger in some spilled salt on the table and drew an abstract pattern with it. He knew what his mum meant. Having a sister who had been murdered by a serial killer had given him an unwanted celebrity status at school that he had only managed to shake off once he’d gone to art school. ‘Why do you dislike him so much?’
‘Every time I see him on TV or in the newspapers, he tells me there is no hope left, that there is only hatred and pain. But hope is all I have.’
‘Mum, you’ve never talked about the logical extension of your belief that she’s still alive, which is—’
‘Darren!’ Dad was warning him off, but it wasn’t going to work this time.
‘Which is that if she’s still alive someone is keeping her captive.’
‘God alive, Darren, how can you even imagine—’
But he pushed home the point. ‘Who is that supposed to be?’
His mum was silent for a moment. ‘I can’t give you that answer, can I? All I can tell you is that a mother’s intuition tells me she’s not gone. Until I have a body, I can’t believe anything else.’
Dad muttered something under his breath and pushed his plate away, leaving the room. Mum didn’t follow him.
Darren picked up some of the grains of s
alt and threw them over his shoulder. His nan had once told him you did it to ward off the devil, but he chose to visit the devil’s lair every day.
He wasn’t sure now that he was strong enough to cope with it.
41
After dinner Darren hurried to his room and took the papers out of Orin’s envelope. There was a folder containing newspaper reports and neatly typed profiles. A lot of the information he had never seen before and he read it all avidly.
It was certainly interesting reading. Olivia’s life read like a checklist of upper-middle-class privilege – a big country house on the beautiful Sussex Downs, a tennis court, a horse, a mother who didn’t have to work and a father who commuted to London and was a big noise locally. The large parties at their country house were written about in the local paper. Olivia and her younger sister Lauren were educated at private school. When Olivia was away in her first year at university, though, their sun-dappled existence came to an abrupt end. Lauren had been a quiet, shy girl who, when she hit fifteen, suddenly changed: she started playing truant, taking drugs, hanging out with the wrong crowd and self-harming. There was a report in the file on her arrest for shoplifting. Darren saw a sullen teenager with a large nose ring staring out of the police photo. He stared at it a while longer and finally realised that Lauren had shaved her eyebrows off.
A local news report explained that Lauren hanged herself when she was sixteen, from a tree in the garden of the family house. Darren read further and discovered that after Lauren’s death Olivia must have dropped out of university. She was living in Hastings when she was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, and was later charged with affray when she attacked a man in a bar with a broken beer bottle. She got a suspended sentence. She lived with a man called Eric Cox for two years – he later got a prison sentence for fencing stolen cars.
