With that thought, I looked at my watch. Gasped. ‘I’ve got to get back; Jacob will be home in half an hour! We’re going straight to the hospital for the night. Umm, I don’t want him to know what I’m doing. You don’t mind keeping this secret, do you?’
‘’Course not.’
‘Are you around tomorrow, or are you job-hunting?’ I asked, hesitant but keen to get on, now we had made a start.
‘I can be around if you want me to be.’
He smiled, and although I felt guilty for taking up his time, I also felt better because I was doing something useful at last. Something so much better than sitting by your side, watching you, helpless. I would get you justice so that when you woke you would know you were safe. I’d protect you, Beth.
Despite knowing there was nothing wrong and everything right with what we were doing, I got Glenn to drop me off at the top of the lane and walked home. Already I knew I wouldn’t share any of this with Jacob. He had enough on his plate juggling work, our fears for your long-term health and money being tight now he was the only breadwinner. Best to keep quiet until I could tell him everything.
The secret was for the greater good, Beth. You understood that, didn’t you?
Thirty
Death was a constant fascination for me. Even as a kid, I thought it the most beautiful thing in the world. I used to enjoy setting traps and seeing what I’d caught. I liked to watch the delicate birds flapping helplessly. The panic in their tiny, beady eyes right up until the point of death. If they froze and accepted their fate it was always a disappointment.
Best were the animals. Watching them pit their strength against my trap, trying and failing, striving for freedom and always falling short. I was a god, with power over their lives.
Seeing them twisting and pulling at the wire, it biting into their skin as they became more and more desperate; it did something for me that nothing else could. I felt truly alive in those moments. Sometimes they even chewed their own leg off. Seeing that took my breath away, and I’d laugh at their audacity.
Whatever they did, they never got away. Where would the fun have been in that?
People are just the same, I’ve discovered. When they are backed into a corner, fighting for their lives, some will snap and snarl. Others panic and lose themselves to fear, bowels opening, mouths screaming. Adults hold little appeal for me, though, with their dull, grey lives.
No, I have more refined taste.
I steal the most protected and precious things on this planet. Children. They are the little treasures of our world, and I am the god who can pilfer them from under their parents’ noses. I’ve done it before; I’ll do it again.
I am killing innocence. I am slaughtering purity. I am butchering potential.
There is no more powerful feeling than that.
Thirty-One
Jacob and I sat side by side. You lay on your hospital bed. I traced the pale blue veins of your eyelids. I listened to the machine breathing for you. I talked about a future with you, me and your dad that felt like a fairy tale. I went quietly mad with grief.
As arranged, Glenn and I met up outside the Picky Person’s Pop In at 9.30 a.m. the next morning, on Wednesday, after Jacob had gone to work. He leaned against the low windowsill of the single-storey, cottage-style building, making some comment to the youngest Jachowski, Roza, about her bike. I waved, and he pushed himself off the sill, sauntering over to me, hands in his parka. Roza sped off, stick-thin legs pumping at the pedals, so that she soon reached the school on the other side of the road.
‘She’s late,’ I observed.
‘She had a dentist’s appointment, apparently. Anyway, I was just finding out about her brother,’ Glenn said.
He bent down and petted Wiggins, who leaned his head into my friend’s hand to ensure his ear got a really good rub.
Guilt at using a seven-year-old child warred with curiosity. ‘Anything interesting?’
A shrugged reply. ‘Not particularly. Only that he likes to read her bedtime stories about princesses.’
Aleksy sounded like a good lad. My heart sank. At that moment, someone emerged from round the back of the shop.
‘Davy! Hi, how are you?’ I sounded so fake.
He gave me a strange, sidelong look. ‘All right, Mel? How’s, er, how’s…’
‘No change.’ I was used to getting that reaction from people, but today I needed to put him at ease. So I made the effort to smile back, trying to make sure it reached my eyes, not just tug my mouth into a weird grimace. Smiling didn’t come easy these days.
‘You remember Glenn Baker, don’t you?’ Introductions proved the perfect icebreaker.
‘Good to have people coming back to the village instead of leaving it,’ Davy beamed. ‘What brings you back here?’
His tiny little nose bobbled up and down as he talked with Glenn. It looked like a small new potato glued to his face, and had earned him the nickname Spud when he was younger. Not that it stopped him attracting women these days. He was all bulging biceps and six-pack. As a consequence, my private nickname for him was ‘paper bag man’ – put a paper bag over his head and he was gorgeous.
Davy was a good bloke, though. Not the brightest in the world, sadly. That was probably the reason why his own Brussels sprout smallholding had failed, and he was now reduced to working on the farm owned by his three elder brothers, Martin, Jon and Peter, who had pooled their resources to buy land.
As the pleasantries between he and Glenn petered out, I struck.
‘I, uh, wondered if I could have a word, actually, Davy. About Beth.’
Instantly his open expression closed down.
‘Melanie… I don’t want to talk about it. It were upsetting.’
I touched his arm. ‘Please, Davy, for me. For Beth.’
Shameless manipulation, but also true. A slow nod of the head conceded his defeat.
‘Look, let’s go to the café. We can sit comfortably there.’
‘No, I don’t really have time for that. What do you want to know?’ As he talked, he shuffled a few steps away so we were no longer in front of the store’s door.
‘Well, how did you find Beth?’
He poked an index finger in his ear and wiggled it, thinking. ‘There were a line of us. We were all just walking along, like the police had shown us. We’d all got our eyes down to the ground, looking for anything she might have dropped. I’d, er, I’d got a bit ahead of the line, and looked up and there she were. Floating, face up, in the water.’
‘So there were lots of you there?’
He nodded furiously. ‘Yeah, yeah, loads of us. The police were there too.’
He sounded so defensive, and I felt a stab of pity for him. Poor bloke had nothing to feel bad about.
‘It’s okay, I’m not accusing you of anything. I just, I don’t know, I wondered if maybe you had seen something, or spotted any of the searchers looking shifty. Anything that might help us get Beth’s attacker.’
‘Mel, honest, I saw nothing.’
‘Why were you ahead of the line?’ asked Glenn.
‘Dunno, just was,’ Davy shrugged. He rolled his thumb and index finger together as he spoke. ‘I didn’t do nothing.’
‘What’s going on?’
We all jumped guiltily at this new voice. There stood Jill, her expression unreadable.
‘We were chatting about when Davy found Beth,’ I explained.
‘He’s told the police all he knows, Melanie. Going over and over it won’t change things.’
She stood with her arms folded over her forest-green pinafore, her stance set in the powerful Henry VIII pose. Her mouth was as flat as usual, her eyes as steely and determined, though softened with pity. But her voice was faster than normal. I looked from her to her son and realised – they were worried, Beth. Twitchy. They knew something.
‘Your brother and dad were there. They saw her with their own eyes,’ added Davy.
He was right. Of course he was right. I was letting
my imagination play tricks on me, desperate to get to the bottom of things.
But, judging from the slight frown, the angle of his head, Glenn was having the same thought as me.
Jill stepped back towards the door. ‘Well, if you’re done, Davy, there’s some stock needs shifting. The boxes are too heavy for me.’
‘Yes, Mum,’ he said, dutifully.
It was only a few steps before they disappeared back inside. But in that time Davy had thrown a look over his shoulder that convinced me we needed to speak to him again. It would have to be without Jill, though. No mean feat, given that he lived with his mum – a woman who exerted a powerful hold not just over her sons, but over the entire village, thanks to her network of extended family. There was nothing that happened in the village that Jill didn’t know about. Not usually, anyway…
Thirty-Two
BETH
FRIDAY 22 JANUARY
Beth ran from SSG. Ran from the look in his eyes that made her stomach twist. She had thought she was being so grown-up; had congratulated herself at the way she was handling things. She was a keeper of secrets. She was going up in people’s estimation, where before she had been invisible, too young to consider.
But she had just been playing at being a grown-up. She was no better than a little kid giving pretend tea parties. She was so out of her depth in this adult world.
She wanted to be back on the bus, chatting innocently with her best friend. She wanted to be home with Mum and Dad and Wiggins. She just wanted to be safe, in a world that had suddenly become very dangerous.
So she ran from SSG. Ran into the darkness.
Thirty-Three
The sky was a uniform dove grey. Glenn, Wiggins and I had come to the marsh because it was easier to talk there than at the pub, but I felt antsy. For all the sky was vast, it felt claustrophobic, the air uncharacteristically still as we stood beside the van gathering our thoughts.
I yanked at my scarf impatiently, feeling stifled. Opened the passenger door and threw it onto Glenn’s crumpled coat, which was chucked on the passenger seat as usual. Then I slammed the door shut again and leaned against it with a huff.
‘That was weird, right? Tell me it’s not my imagination.’
‘Davy and Jill definitely seemed to be hiding something.’
‘She’s always been more protective of him than the others, but—’
‘’Cos he’s thick like his dad.’
I nodded; it was cruel, but it was true. Jill had famously been the brains of her marriage. Everyone knew the store owner’s life story – it was too juicy ever to die away. Villagers had apparently been scandalised when sixteen-year-old Jill, the daughter of an alcoholic prostitute on Wapentake docks, had married a forty-five-year-old pig farmer. After ten years of marriage, Bill Young had keeled over from a massive heart attack. Jill had been pregnant with Davy at the time, and had three boys under the age of ten to look after. But that hadn’t slowed her; she’d sold the tiny farm and sunk the money into the Picky Person’s Pop In. To be honest, Beth, I’d always admired her tenacity and business brain – but Davy definitely hadn’t inherited those traits.
Glenn slipped his notebook out of his pocket and made a quick record of what had happened.
‘What possessed you to buy a pink pad? It doesn’t seem very you,’ I snapped.
My gesture took in the van, which, thanks to mud and general road grime, looked more brown than white. It had a large penis drawn on the back by some comedian, along with the words: I wish my girlfriend was this dirty. Then I took a glance at Glenn himself. Big brown workmen’s boots, dark jeans that were slightly tatty around the hem, a plain, dark blue sweatshirt with the cuff fraying lightly at the right wrist. Even the parka he barely ever wore was only just on the right side of grubby.
A myriad emotions flitted across Glenn’s face. His small eyes flashed with hurt as he shrank away from me slightly. Instantly I regretted my words. I had overstepped the mark, taking my mood out on him.
A second later he turned to me again, his round face as open as ever. He gave a heartfelt sigh.
‘Might as well tell you the truth. It’s my daughter’s notebook.’
‘You have a daughter? But… why have you never mentioned her?’
He shrugged an apology. ‘It’s complicated. Her mum and me, we didn’t exactly split amicably. Her mum – well, she uses my girl as a weapon against me. Basically, she’s banned me from seeing her.’
Fury raced through me. How dare someone use their child like that? Glenn had a healthy daughter who he could talk to, spend time with, make new memories with. Things I was desperate to do with you, Beth, but couldn’t. No one had the right to deprive a parent of their child.
‘Why the hell did she do that?’
‘Because she can, because she’s a vindictive—’ He bit off the retort and shrugged again. ‘It’s Marcie’s way. She’s spiteful, and she knows that the best way of hurting me is to keep me from my daughter.’
‘What’s her name?’
He was so upset that for a moment he couldn’t speak. He swallowed hard. ‘Katie. Her name is Katie. She’s twelve.’
‘Oh, Glenn, why didn’t you say something? You’ve listened so patiently to my troubles.’
‘Yeah, but what I’m going through is nothing compared to your situation. And it’s one of the reasons why I’m helping you. If anyone hurt my daughter, I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions.’
I felt dreadful for him, especially as I’d never asked him much about his life. I reached out and rubbed his arm, consoling.
‘Tell me about her.’ My words were gentle.
‘I don’t really want to talk about it. It hurts too much.’ Glenn stepped away, as if distancing himself from his pain. ‘Maybe I’ll tell you everything one day, Melanie.’
For his sake, I changed the subject; started yattering about shared childhood memories and what people had been up to while he’d been away. Soon, any tension had disappeared.
‘To be honest, not many people have moved away. It’s not terribly adventurous of us, is it?’
‘You been abroad much?’
I shook my head. ‘Nowhere more far-flung than Spain; the usual holiday destinations. We prefer to stay in this country, especially since we got Wiggins.’
The russet dog looked up at the sound of his name and wagged his tail, before being distracted by a scent trail and hurrying off busily into the long grasses.
‘I’ve been to a few places. Australia, Thailand, Borneo.’
‘Really? Wow, you make me look so parochial.’
He swelled at the compliment. ‘Yeah, when I split with Marcie in September I went to Australia for a month. It was good to get away. You should go some time.’
I raised an eyebrow and he blushed, clearly realising the mistake he’d made. No holidays for me until you woke up.
* * *
We walked past the stunted, twisted sycamore that marked your shrine, and the pond where you had floated. On we continued, towards the only other blip on the horizon: an old armed forces lookout tower, completely dwarfed by its vast surroundings. Anywhere else, the 1970s building would have looked massive and impressive, despite starting to look a little the worse for wear in places, having been battered for decades by the unforgiving wind.
‘Do the RAF still own the building?’ asked Glenn.
‘No, they sold it. It’s owned by Jill Young, actually,’ I added after laughing at Wiggins. He had been jumping through the undergrowth of the marsh beside the firmer path, and looked as if he had springs for legs. I gave him a cuddle as he came back over to me, panting, then darted off again, nose down, tail up.
‘Why the hell did she buy this place?’
‘Reckon she’d watched one too many episodes of Grand Designs and thought she could do it up and make a killing. She bought it back in 2005, immediately before the credit crunch. As far as I know, she’s done nothing with it since. Must be a bit of a millstone around her neck, really.’
‘Serves her right for being greedy,’ Glenn sniffed. ‘Why doesn’t she sell it? She might not make a killing now, but she’d get her money back, surely?’
‘Well,’ I leaned closer, simply gossiping now. And loving it. ‘She tried to sell it at auction—’
‘Probably hoping to get a sucker from down south to pay an overinflated price.’
‘Exactly. And because it’s such an unusual building the sale even got some national press mentions… but no bid met the reserve price, so that was that.’
Glenn huffed. Looked up, craning his neck and shielding his eyes from the glare of the milky sky that managed to be both overcast and bright at the same time. The five-storey tower was hexagonal in shape. Two of those storeys – the middle and the top – had windows wrapped all the way around, giving 360-degree views.
You know I’d always had a soft spot for the place, Beth. Although industrial-looking and mainly concrete, there was something pleasing about the shape. Remember the conversations we all had, picturing how it would be if we owned it? The lounge would be at the top so that we could fully appreciate the views as we sat. With land this flat, we could literally see for miles and miles. If we looked inland we could probably see right to the mighty cathedral-like church in the town of Wapentake. Facing the sea was even more dramatic, watching the weather fronts racing in, waiting for them to hit. It would be wonderful, exhilarating, far better than sitting in front of a widescreen television. We’d have full cinematic vision.
The building attached to the tower was the size of an industrial cattle shed. We’d fantasised about Jacob one day being able to run a woodcarving business from it. He was brilliant. You remember the beautiful I Will Always Love You plaque that hangs over our bed? And you saw the mirror he gave me for our most recent wedding anniversary, with the exquisite carved frame? Such a talent! Then, of course, there’s the egret he carved for your birthday. But you haven’t seen that yet…
The Darkest Lies: A gripping psychological thriller with a shocking twist Page 11
