by Jane Casey
All I have to do is tell Mum, grab my stuff, and get the hell out.
It makes me feel sick, thinking about it. I rock with the motion of the train, watching fields slip by. Everything in me is screaming that I shouldn’t contemplate going home again after graduating, that I’ve made the right decision. That part of my life is over. I don’t even think that Mum wants me to go back. But I haven’t said it to her yet. I haven’t told her about Ben, my boyfriend of two years, who knows that he’ll probably never get to meet my mother, but not why. And I haven’t told Ben about Charlie or Dad or any of the things that have made me who I am. Too many secrets. Too much held back. There will have to be a grand coming-clean one of these days, so he can find out exactly who he’s in love with. But not yet.
Mum comes first.
The house looks empty when I walk up the road, lugging my bag; the windows are dark. Mum is never out, but there’s no point in ringing the bell. I find my keys and let myself in, aware of a strange smell that might be rotting food, and something else.
When I put on the lights, I see her straight away, lying awkwardly at the foot of the stairs. I’m not aware of moving, of dropping my bag, but suddenly I’m beside her, and I’m saying, ‘Mum! Can you hear me? Mummy?’
I haven’t called her that for years.
She makes a small sound, and relief makes me gasp, but she’s cold and her colour is dreadful. Her leg is bent under her at an angle and I know it’s broken; I also know she’s been there for a long time. There’s a dark stain on the carpet underneath her and the smell is stronger here, ammoniac.
‘I’m going to call an ambulance,’ I say clearly, and move away towards the phone that was just inches out of her reach all along. A hand closes around my ankle with surprising strength and I half-scream. She’s trying to speak, her eyes fluttering.
I bend over her, trying not to react to the smell of her body, her breath, feeling horror and compassion and shame. It takes her a few seconds to speak again.
‘Don’t … leave me.’
I swallow hard, trying to clear the lump that’s blocking my throat. ‘I won’t, Mum. I promise.’
I call for the ambulance and sit by her bed, and speak to the doctors and clear up the mess at home. I call Ben and tell him I’ve changed my mind. I let him think that I never really cared for him. I let him think I lied. I stop answering my mobile and ignore texts from my friends. I burn all the bridges. I cut myself off.
And it never occurs to me – not once – that I’m getting it wrong, that I’ve failed to understand my mother once again.
Don’t leave me?
Not quite.
Don’t. Leave me.
That makes a lot more sense.
Chapter 18
THE POLICEMAN OUTSIDE the Shepherds’ house looked bored. He had taken shelter under a cherry tree in the front garden, but the rain was still running in rivulets down his high-visibility jacket and off the peak of his cap. The press had mostly moved on to more interesting stories. Here and there someone sat in a car with steamed-up windows, watching.
In daylight, I could see details I hadn’t noticed on my previous visit – the lawn was rutted and gouged by the feet of many visitors. I paused for a second to look over the gate before turning away, towards my car.
‘Sarah!’
I knew who it was straightaway, even before I looked back to see Valerie Wade standing in the doorway of the Shepherds’ house, peering out through the rain. Oh great. I had completely forgotten that she would be there. All I needed was for her to call Vickers and let him know I was at the Shepherds’ house. I had a feeling that he would not approve.
‘I thought that was you,’ she said triumphantly. ‘I was just looking out the window and I saw you standing there. Did you want something?’
I wanted to run away from her, get into my car and drive out of Elmview for ever, but that wasn’t practical, especially since my car still needed the attention of the AA to get it moving. And my reluctance to explain what I had been doing in the Shepherds’ road – and why my car had been outside their house for so long – was even stronger now. I would have to bluff it out. Besides, there was something I wanted to say to the Shepherds. I would never have a better chance. It was as if it was meant to be.
I went through the gate and walked up the path, aware of the policeman watching me from under the branches.
‘I was wondering, would it be possible to speak to the Shepherds? I never really got a chance to talk to them about what happened with Jenny, and – well, I’d just really like to.’
Someone moved in the house behind Valerie, and I heard a rumble that was too low-pitched for me to be able to distinguish the words from where I was standing. Valerie stepped back.
‘OK. Come on in, Sarah.’
In the hall, I felt suddenly self-conscious and busied myself with finding somewhere for my dripping umbrella to stand and taking off my jacket. The hall reeked of the dense, heady scent of lilies, but an undertone of pond-water suggested they were past their best. I traced the smell to an elaborate arrangement by the telephone. The fat white blooms were tinged with brown, on the point of disintegration, the petals splayed out. No one had bothered to take off the florist’s cellophane before ramming the stems into a vase.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ Valerie asked, heading for the kitchen when I nodded, leaving me unsure where to go. I turned to look around and froze as I faced the stairs. On the second-to-last step, Michael Shepherd was sitting, forearms resting on his knees. He turned his big hands over to look at his palms, studied them for a few seconds, then let them drop. When he looked up at me I was struck again by his coal-black eyes. They still burned with ferocious intensity, but now it was the last blaze of a fire that had nearly burned out. He looked exhausted without being in the least diminished; the self-confidence and power I had noticed previously had been distilled into pure determination to endure. I found myself thinking again of my own father, wondering if he had been as strong, or as undone as the man before me.
‘What do you want?’ His voice was gravelly, as if he hadn’t used it much recently.
‘I wanted to talk to you and Mrs Shepherd,’ I managed, trying to appear calm and composed. ‘I – well, I probably understand better than most people what you’re going through. And there’s something I wanted to tell you. Something I thought you should know.’
‘Really?’ His tone was incurious, insultingly so, laden with sarcasm. It whipped blood into my cheeks and I bit my lip. He sighed, but got to his feet. ‘Come and talk to us, then.’
I followed him into the sitting room, seeing everywhere the signs of a safe, upwardly mobile life disrupted cruelly and irrevocably. Photographs of Jenny stood in frames on most of the surfaces and hung on the walls, photographs featuring ponies and tutus and bikinis, all the accoutrements of the middle-class child who doesn’t know what it is to want for anything. They had given her every possible advantage, every possible opportunity that her friends from wealthier backgrounds might have had. I looked at the pictures, at Jenny’s smile, and I thought that none of us had known her. For all that I’d found out about her secret life, I hadn’t gained any kind of insight into her. I knew what she had done, but I couldn’t begin to understand why, and nor, I suspected, could anyone else. All that we had to go on now were Danny Keane’s lies.
The house might have stood in a fairly modest estate, but here too the urge to improve had been given free rein. It had been extended at some stage and the ground floor appeared to be almost twice the size of the house I’d lived in all my life. Glass double doors separated the living room from a dining room. Matching doors led from there into the garden where I could see a patio with high-end garden furniture and a built-in barbecue. The kitchen, visible through an open door, was expensively fitted, all cream units and black marble worktops. A huge TV dominated the living room, its screen so big that the picture was distorted. The sound was off and a Sky newsreader was overenunciating earnestly, her face
contorted with the effort of looking serious and engaged with what she was reading off the autocue. A large sofa faced the TV, and Mrs Shepherd sat on it, arms wrapped around her body, gazing at the screen unseeingly. She didn’t look up when I walked in, and I had time to notice the extreme change in her too. Her skin was blotchy and raw around her nose and eyes. As before, her hair was lank and stringy. She wore a sweatshirt, jeans and trainers, and the glamorous image she had once projected was long gone; it was functional clothing and it hung on her frame. Where Michael Shepherd burned with rage, his wife seemed frozen by grief.
‘Sit down,’ Shepherd said brusquely to me, pointing to an armchair at an angle to the sofa. He sat beside his wife and took her hand, squeezing it so hard his knuckles bleached white. It wrung a short cry of protest from her, but succeeded in breaking into her reverie.
‘Diane, this is … one of Jenny’s teachers.’ He looked at me blankly and passed a hand over his forehead. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.’
‘Sarah Finch. I was Jenny’s English teacher.’
‘And what is it that you wanted to share with us?’ He sounded wary, resentful almost. Diane Shepherd was staring at me hopelessly. I sat up straight, squeezing my hands together.
‘I’ve just come to talk to you because – well, because of that.’ I pointed at the TV screen, where a reporter was speaking against a backdrop of trees. The red tickertape running along the bottom of the screen screamed, ‘Surrey police discover body on railway embankment – sources say it may be that of schoolboy Charlie Barnes, missing since 1992.’ The live image faded, replaced by the standard picture of Charlie that all the media outlets used; the school photograph where he grinned engagingly at the camera, his eyes full of life. I turned back to the Shepherds, who were looking at the screen uncomprehendingly. ‘Charlie is – was, I mean – my brother. I was eight when he went missing. The police found his body this morning.’
‘Sorry for your loss.’ Michael Shepherd’s jaw was clenched so hard, the words barely got out between his teeth.
‘The thing is, he was killed by Danny Keane’s father.’ I knew the name would jolt them into attention. This was the hard part. ‘When Jenny disappeared, it brought everything back for me. I was – I was sort of involved from the start. I found Jenny, actually, in the woods – you might know that already.’
The two of them were staring at me. Diane looked dazed, her mouth a little bit open. Her husband was frowning and I couldn’t tell why. ‘Of course I remember. You kept cropping up,’ he said finally.
‘Tea!’ Valerie clattered in from the kitchen with a tray loaded with mugs. ‘I didn’t know if you’d want sugar, Sarah, so it’s on the tray and there’s milk too; you can add your own. I know how you two like your tea,’ and she gave an awkward little giggle as she bent down to let the Shepherds take their mugs. There were two left on the tray and I realised with a sinking feeling that Valerie intended to join us. Michael Shepherd had noticed too and before she could sit down, he intervened.
‘I think we’d like to keep this conversation between the three of us, Val. Can you give us a few minutes?’
‘Of course.’ The colour rushed into her cheeks. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me, though.’ She stumped back out, carrying her mug, head held high. I didn’t like her at all, not one little bit, but I felt a twinge of pity for her; what was she supposed to achieve here, apart from making endless cups of tea? They were waiting for news of a confession, I knew, and it could come at any time, but all the same, the Shepherds struck me as being in dire need of time alone.
‘You were saying?’ Michael Shepherd prompted me. I really didn’t want to go on.
‘The thing is … my parents suffered a lot after Charlie disappeared. They couldn’t live with what happened, and they couldn’t live with one another, and in the end it destroyed them both. I don’t want the same thing to happen to you. No one deserves to go through what they did. If nothing else, I’d like something good to come out of what they endured.’ I took a deep breath. ‘And there’s something else.’
‘Yes?’
‘Danny Keane … the things he did were dreadful. Terrible. But you should understand why he did them.’ I was getting ready to tell them that it was my fault, that they shouldn’t blame themselves. What did it matter if they blamed me?
Michael Shepherd stirred. ‘Has he confessed, then? Keane?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ I had to admit.
‘I thought you might have heard before we did. You seem to be well in with the police.’
His tone was unpleasant and I blushed again. ‘I’ve got to know them, that’s all. As you said, I kept cropping up.’ I pretended to sip my tea, playing for time. It was far too hot to drink. I looked around for a place to put my mug, not liking to put it on the highly polished table at my elbow without a coaster. In the end, I reached down and set it on the floor.
‘Look, what I really came here to tell you was –’
There was a clatter of claws on tiling. A small, dirty West Highland terrier shot into the living room from the kitchen and pranced up to me, panting engagingly, head on one side.
‘That bloody dog!’ Michael Shepherd jumped up from the sofa, towering over the dog that was crouching by my feet with his tail wagging tentatively.
Diane stirred. ‘Just leave it. He’s not doing any harm.’
‘I should have got rid of him,’ Michael said over his shoulder to his wife, reaching down to drag the dog by the collar towards the kitchen. He handled him roughly and the little dog whimpered, cringing away from him. I found myself holding the arms of my chair, wanting to intervene but knowing I couldn’t. As he disappeared through the open door, I could hear him telling Valerie off. ‘I’ve told you before, he doesn’t come into the house any more. The place for him is outside.’
‘He just ran in when I opened the door.’
‘I’m not interested, Valerie. You’ve got to be more careful.’
I looked at Diane, whose eyes were closed. Her lips were moving, as if she was praying. Her mouth looked dry, covered with tattered flecks of dead skin, and her eyelids were raw. They flickered as I watched and she met my gaze.
‘Is that Jenny’s dog?’
It was a moment or two before she responded. ‘Archie. Mike can’t stand the sight of him.’
That much was obvious from the way he’d handled him. ‘I suppose it reminds him. It must have been awful when Archie turned up here without her.’
She started shivering so violently that I could see it from across the room, and I felt sorry at once for reminding her. Her eyes were unfocused and I felt that she was miles away, that she’d forgotten I was there at all. When she spoke, I had to strain to hear her.
‘Turned up here? But Archie was here all along …’ As her voice trailed away, it was as if she came to her senses. She sat up a little straighter and cleared her throat. ‘I mean, yes. It was a shock. We didn’t expect Archie to be outside the front door at all, because he should have been with Jenny.’
But that wasn’t what she’d said.
I sat in my chair as if nailed there, frozen with horror. I felt as if everything I’d previously known and understood had suddenly shifted through fifteen degrees, forming a new and wholly horrible reality. I had to be mistaken, I told myself. I was still in shock because of what had happened with Mum, with Charlie’s body. I saw death and violence everywhere, in everything, and what I was imagining was impossible. It was unthinkable.
That didn’t mean it wasn’t true.
She had turned her head, listening intently to the sounds from the back of the house. The voices were receding, as if Valerie and Michael had gone out to the back garden. There was time, I thought – not much, but some. Maybe enough.
‘Diane,’ I said carefully, keeping my voice low and level, ‘if things didn’t happen exactly the way you told the police, that’s OK. But if there’s anything – anything at all – that you think they should know about what happen
ed to Jenny, I think now would be a good time to tell them.’
She dropped her head and stared at her hands, which were knotted in her lap. Tension was vibrating through her. I could see her struggling, wanting to speak. I waited, hardly daring to blink.
‘He’ll kill me.’ It was a ghost of a sentence, slipping from her on an outward breath, and I flinched at the fear in her eyes when she looked up at me.
‘They’ll protect you. They can help you.’ I needed to press her, and knowing what I was doing, hating myself for it, I said, ‘Don’t you want to tell the truth, Diane? For Jenny?’
‘Everything we did was for her.’ Her eyes were on a picture on the table beside her, a holiday picture of a younger Jenny in a swimsuit, blue sky behind her, laughing down at the camera. Silence settled on the room and I almost jumped when Diane spoke again. ‘There’s no point, is there? There’s no point in any of it. I thought there was. I don’t know why.’
‘I understand that you’re afraid, Diane, but if you just—’
‘I was afraid,’ she interrupted, her voice stronger now. ‘I was afraid, so I did what he wanted. But I’m not going to lie for him any more. He thinks what he did was right, but how could it have been? And I couldn’t stop him. There was nothing I could do to save her, because everything has to be perfect for Michael. He can’t stand it if things aren’t just … perfect.’
‘Even Jenny?’
‘Especially Jenny. She knew he wouldn’t stand for her being disobedient. She should have known it was dangerous.’
I was remembering Michael Shepherd at the police station, the scene he had made when he realised that his daughter’s abuse would be common knowledge. At the time, I had seen it as wanting to protect her, even in death. I had got it wrong. He’d wanted to protect her reputation. He’d wanted to protect himself.
