All the Hidden Truths

by Claire Askew

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I need to get into this house. She’s not answering her phone, she’s not answering the door, and if she’s on the brink of death in there and you stood in the way of vital first aid—’

  Moira lunged for the security chain. At the sound of its rattle, Amy fell silent. With some difficulty, Moira undid the various locks, and pulled open the door.

  ‘What,’ she said, looking into Amy’s horrified face, ‘makes you think I’d be lying dead in here?’

  Beyond the garden wall, the reporters started up their repetitive, gull-like cries. The two policemen manoeuvred themselves into a kind of protective wall behind Amy. The one in the plain black uniform leaned forward, and spoke close to Amy’s ear.

  ‘Let’s take this inside, shall we?’

  Moira still hadn’t dealt with the broken window. As she wandered into the living room, she vaguely registered the darkness thrown by the hoarding, but kept walking. Behind her, Amy let out a shriek.

  ‘Moira, your feet!’

  She looked down. She was wearing yesterday’s tights, but no shoes, and the nude Lycra fabric of one foot had begun to turn a dull, iron red.

  Amy was beside her then, gripping her arm with both hands and part guiding, part lifting her over the flecks and shards to the couch.

  ‘You should have let me clean this up,’ Amy said. ‘Now look what’s happened.’ She squatted beside Moira and lifted her foot. Behind her, her male colleague hovered, his face pale. Amy looked back at him and gestured towards the kitchen door.

  ‘Go find me a pair of scissors, will you? I’m going to need to cut these tights and get to the problem. And run some water over a clean cloth.’

  The man disappeared through the swing door.

  Moira pressed a hand to her forehead. Her skull seemed to pulse against the palm.

  ‘Amy,’ she said, ‘why did you say you thought I was dead?’

  There was no answer. Amy had her face up close to the sole of Moira’s foot.

  ‘Have you people got me on suicide watch? Is that why you’re here?’

  Amy’s fiddling around had loosened the piece of glass from her flesh. She could feel it now, prickling between her skin and the wet netting of the tights.

  ‘I’m sorry, Moira,’ Amy said. ‘There have just been a few things, this past week, that made me think . . .’

  Moira remembered the balled-up letter in the kitchen bin, how she’d had the thought herself while she was writing it.

  ‘Well, you needn’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going to kill myself. I’ve decided I’m not.’

  Amy looked up at her.

  ‘How could I?’ Moira said. ‘How could I end my life after all those girls lost theirs? And because of my son.’

  Amy was still looking at her, steadily, not speaking.

  ‘No.’ Moira looked away. ‘I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t be that selfish.’

  Amy’s colleague came back into the room, his hands bundled with items.

  ‘Scissors,’ he said, and handed Amy a long pair with grey handles. They were the ones Moira used to cut meat: to snip apart strings of sausages, slice the skins off things. She didn’t say anything. Amy began snipping at the tights fabric.

  ‘I saw on the news,’ Moira said, ‘that it’s Abigail Hodgekiss’s funeral today.’

  Amy and the policeman exchanged looks.

  ‘Cremation,’ the man corrected, and when Moira’s brow furrowed, he added, ‘too much public scrutiny for a big funeral right now. They’ll do that part later, I expect.’

  Moira closed her eyes. Ryan’s body had not yet been released to her, though she guessed it wouldn’t be long before Amy sat her down for that particular talk. She tried to imagine herself organising Ryan’s funeral. It felt like only an eye-blink ago that she’d stumbled through Jackie’s – Ryan beside her in an ill-fitting suit, his teeth chattering slightly in the cold chapel with its meagre congregation of relatives. She tried to remember the order in which she’d done things: coffin? Flowers? Readings? But the very thought of it hurt – physically, a hot pain in the side of her head. She remembered now why she’d gone downstairs in the middle of the night for the wine.

  ‘They’re talking about this big, public memorial service, of course,’ the policeman was saying. Moira could see Amy gritting her teeth. ‘Televised live, they’re saying.’

  ‘Oh,’ Amy said – a little too quickly, too brightly, dabbing at Moira’s foot – ‘this isn’t so bad. The blood just made it look worse than it was.’

  The policeman had also brought a damp J-cloth, a tube of Savlon he must have rifled out of a drawer, and a box of plasters. Moira was impressed. She was fairly sure that if she’d ever sent Jackie to find first aid supplies in that kitchen he’d have come back with nothing but a hangdog expression. She considered making a comment about it, but then remembered: no. No jokes. People are dead.

  Instead, she avoided the policeman’s eyes, and none of them spoke as Amy daubed cold cream onto the wound, and then gingerly placed a large plaster over it.

  ‘Steve?’ Amy eventually said. ‘Can you nip upstairs and fetch a pair of shoes for Moira?’

  She waggled an index finger.

  ‘This isn’t to happen again, all right? I’m going to get this cleaned up for you.’

  Moira smiled a thin smile and thought of the wine bottle. She wasn’t sure she could guarantee the not-happening-again part.

  Amy stood, and brushed down her pencil skirt. She crunched back across the glass, into the hallway, and then reappeared, carrying a laptop bag, which she placed on the sofa next to Moira. It took Moira a moment to realise that the bag was hers. The laptop she’d bought herself when she started her OU degree – she’d forgotten about all of that, and now tried to care. No emotion came.

  ‘We’re finished with it,’ Amy said. ‘Turns out, it’s clean – we don’t think Ryan ever used it. You can have it back.’

  Moira waited until Amy and the policeman named Steve had closed the front door behind them, waited until she heard the baying of the paparazzi outside dwindle, and then stop. Then she unzipped the bag, removed the laptop and booted it up.

  Things were a little different. Her desktop display picture had disappeared: now, the little file icons floated on a background of plain black. The photo had been one of Jackie and Ryan, taken a few family holidays ago. It showed Ryan in teenager mode, looking sulkily at the camera, his grinning father’s arm thrown around his shoulders, a white beach in the background. Moira wondered if it had been removed in order to spare her the painful moment of opening the laptop and seeing it there.

  After only a moment’s deliberation, Moira did exactly what Amy had told her not to do. She clicked on the little icon in the task bar at the bottom of the screen, and opened a new browser window. I just want to look, she thought, and see if the graffiti is still there. With shaking hands, she typed ‘Ryan Summers family home’ into the search bar.

  Naturally, there were plenty of photos of her house. She peered at the little rectangular thumbnails. It was disorientating, seeing the house she’d lived in for decades through the lenses of the pack of men outside. Some of the photos had people in them: various different scene guards, some of them women. Amy, walking down the garden path towards the road, her hand held up to shield her face. The graffiti was visible in all of them.

  Moira wasn’t satisfied. She’d known as soon as she’d opened the computer that she wouldn’t be, that photos of her house weren’t really what she was looking for. She clicked out of the images tab and into the web one, and began to read. It felt as though all the air in the room – in the house – was being sucked out. Like she was suffocating.

  Her son’s name was everywhere, and it appeared alongside words like monster, crazed, loner and even beast. Is serial murderer Ryan Summers, one bright blue line of text read, the ultimate product of toxic masculinity? Another: Three Rivers killer Ryan Summers practised his massacre via first-person shooters. And another: Murderer’
s mother released from custody – they say she’s innocent, but there’s blood on her hands.

  Moira was pitched headlong back into a memory: it happened so fast she felt physically jolted, as though she’d hit an unseen pothole while driving at speed. It was a scene she’d tried not to think about these twenty years or more, and she’d done okay – yet here it was. The memory of looking down at her own hand and finding it smeared and filmed with blood – her own blood, blood that smelled like her. Terror flooding her heart’s engine. Twitching back the sheets and finding the bed filled with it, that same rusty blood. The sound that rose out of her, waking Jackie – how young he was, in the memory, how alive! – not a scream, but a sort of low animal drone. They’d agreed, later, on the day of Ryan’s careful, miraculous birth, not to tell him about the older brother or sister he never did get to have. But since Jackie’s death Moira had considered it, more than once. She had thought that perhaps it might pull them closer, might call her son back from whatever distant place he seemed to have drifted to since his father passed away. Now he was gone, and Jackie was gone, and the baby that never became a baby had been gone for so very long, and it was as though the secrets that had never been shared inside the four walls of this house were the problem, the reason, for it all.

  Moira felt a hot spurt of rage rise up inside her: it started behind her breastbone and built until it spilled out of her mouth in that same droning growl she’d only ever made once before. Her body lurched: she gripped the front corner of the laptop and flipped it off her lap as though it had scalded her. It thudded onto the carpet. Moira bent over double, put her head between her knees, and howled. The sound was like a drowning machine: its big guttural rev ebbing, flecking her face with strings of snot and spit as she sobbed. She felt as though everything she’d ever loved had been lost, and it was her fault – somehow, every time, she’d done it. Her. You deserve this, she thought, over and over. You. deserve. this.

  But after a while the noise she couldn’t quite believe was coming out of her began to dim. She blinked fast, and waited until quiet fell. This was it: she was still here. She really was going to have to keep on living.

  Moira straightened up, and wiped the gunk from her face with a yanked-down sleeve. Feeling empty and absurd, she lifted the laptop from the carpet and righted it across her knees once more. The lit screen still showed the returned search page, and as though the past quarter-hour hadn’t happened at all, she resumed her mechanical downward scroll. Moira didn’t click on any of the links – merely marvelled at the sheer number of them. As she moved backwards through the many pages of search results, the website names became less and less familiar. The results started with BBC News, the Guardian, Huffington Post, and various websites belonging to tabloid newspapers. By page 8 or so, the article sources began to change: personal blogs and forum threads called things like opencases, operationjustice and unsungheroes began to appear. Moira shuddered. The world was making its mind up about her son.

  Out of habit, she clicked open her emails. The inbox was chock-full of unread messages, some with subject lines like So sorry for your loss and Are you okay? and Thinking of you. But near the top, in the newest messages, there were also a few with subject lines like Rot in hell and You will pay for what you’ve done. Some were prefaced with Re: Re: Re: Re:, and Moira realised that there must have been many more of these – the police must have been removing them while the laptop was in their care. Her vision swam. A bubble of panic began to swell in her mind. People hated her. What did they know about her? What might they know about her?

  Then, as she began ticking the little ‘select’ boxes that would allow her to delete the hateful emails, her eyes alighted on a subject line that caused her to sob, just once, out loud into the still of the house. Is Ryan still alive? it read.

  She opened the message up almost instinctively, without even looking at the sender’s address.

  Dear Moira,

  My name is Grant Lockley. I’m a freelance journalist. We spoke briefly on the phone the night you were released from police custody, but it seems you were a little too fragile to really talk then. That is totally understandable. However, I’d like to take this opportunity to reach out to you again, and offer you some information I have come across that I thought might be of interest to you.

  I’ve been tracking the chat threads on a website named Truth Unifies. The community there is, like many members of the public, very keen to know why Ryan might have done what he did at Three Rivers, and they have been conducting their own investigations. What they’re discussing at the moment is the possibility that there’s more to the shooting than the police or media are telling us. You can see that discussion at http://truthunifies.com/110355

  Moira paused, and stared at the glowing blue text of the hyperlink.

  ‘I really wouldn’t go on the internet right now,’ Amy had said, not for the first time, as she left the house. ‘I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that people out there are grieving, and one of the stages of grief is anger. People are angry. That’s why we’ve got uniformed officers outside your door.’

  Moira’s face must have looked sceptical – or perhaps she just hadn’t responded fast enough – because Amy added, ‘I strongly suggest that you just take my word for it. Trust me. The internet is not a healthy place for you to be right now.’

  Moira let Amy’s words drift through her head once again. Then she took a sharp, deep breath, and clicked on the link.

  truthunifies.com

  the freedom to think is the freedom to think differently

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  truthunifies: FORUMS: POPULAR: Three Rivers College Ryan Summers is still alive?

  Submitted by | FoolBritannia

  Moderators | LastManPandering f1ypaper 86vintage born_yesterday iamthatgirl | Report thread

  FoolBritannia View profile 11 posts

  Posted at 22:34:07

  Hey truthers,

  I’ve started this O/T because I’ve seen various claims and/or theories floating around on here relating to Three Rivers College and I’d like to get to the bottom of them. I’m talking specifically about the posts here and here. Both threads have already been compromised by false flag deniers and as a result all attempts at discussion are being derailed. The questions I have are being ignored or used as an opportunity to attack me (this has been reported to the mods but I’m guessing nothing will come of it). So here are my questions:

  Why so little panic? From what I have seen on TV news coverage, witnesses appear calm and unfazed. Aerial shots of the campus show very little movement with all police and other emergency vehicles appearing to be stationary and a long way back from the main entrances to the college buildings. Once they’d ascertained Summers was down, wouldn’t the ambulances be right up there?

  Where are the students? This is the main campus of a college that serves several local authorities (I guess what you in the US would call ‘counties’?) and according to the Three Rivers Wikipedia page, there are over 7,000 students in attendance at Tweed Campus alone (though this includes part-time and distance-learning students who may or may not have been there that day). Again, on the aerial shots I’ve seen, there are suspiciously few people milling around, and many appear to be first responders/emergency personnel. Where are all those students?

  If this event was in fact a false flag or some kind of drill, what possible reason could there be? I get that in the US false flags are used all the time as excuses to tighten gun legislation, but the fact Summers got hold of any kind of gun in this country is already pretty incredible (trust me, I have tried myself. It sucks). Is this about surveillance?

  Again, if this event was a false flag, who is Ryan Summers? Does anyone out there have any intel on him?

  [Reply]

  Moira blinked: once, twice. She could understand only parts of what she was reading, but the words some kind of drill made her heart clang like a bell. She thought back to the morning of the shooting –
was it really two whole weeks ago? – standing on her own front lawn. As the black-clad, flak-jacketed policemen had beetled back and forth around her; as her neighbours had appeared in increasing numbers to gawk from the opposite pavement; as she’d watched possessions of hers and Jackie’s and Ryan’s being carried out of the house and placed into the vans outside, she’d had the very same thought. Maybe this is just some kind of drill.

  She forced her eyes to refocus, and CTRL + clicked on the link where the text said aerial shots. It took her to a blog that may have been the commenter, FoolBritannia’s, own. The aerial photos had been taken from a news helicopter: some were stills from rolling footage and snippets from the live ticker were visible along their bottom edge. Someone had circled the clusters of emergency vehicles in shaky, MS-Paint-red. Captions explained to Moira what she was seeing: the drop-off point outside the college entrance was empty, the ambulances parked a good hundred yards away. She clicked back to the first tab, read on.

  underthejail View profile 2341 posts

  Posted at 22:41:55

  Well first off welcome FoolBritannia thanks for your insight from Britain

  Hows the mood over there rn?

  So I also have been monitoring the situation closely and watching news coverage which here in the US has been less full than I would like but even so I have noticed same things as you

  Lack of panic and where are the students

  Strange position of emergency vehicles and also low numbers for this kind of incident

  I am convinced this event was a live drill perhaps an active shooter drill in which case Ryan Summers probably a paid actor or member of the military trained for this purpose

  My guess is as with the many US hoax shootings he is alive and well and picking up a new id and big paycheck right now

  You ask why the British govt would do this

  Pretty obvious they have followed in the footsteps of USA and seen how Democrats have benefitted from many hoax shootings here