by Harriet Tyce
“There’s a shortage of officers right now,” she says. “There’s been an incident in Ipswich; an explosion in a factory. Everyone’s on call there—potential fatalities. We’ll just have to be quick.”
Without warning, Labinjoh slams on the sirens. I’m jolted backward in my seat as the speed picks up, faster and faster. I wasn’t sure they were taking this seriously.
I was wrong.
Slung from side to side as we screech through interminable roundabouts, I try to clutch on to the car with my left hand, and my phone with my right. As we swerve through a turning to the right across a dual carriageway, the phone vibrates in my hand. I look at the screen—a text from Nicole. I try to open the message but the car pulls out to overtake a tractor without warning and the phone flies from my hand into the other side of the car, out of my reach.
We’re there, though, we’re nearly there, and we drive past a golf course, a long street of houses, a church on the left. I barely have time to take it all in before we’re screeching across a main road and past a pub, turning right into a narrow residential road, one back from the sea front. We come to a halt beside another pub, close to the entrance to an alleyway.
“Here?” I say.
“Here,” Labinjoh says.
Between the pub and the alleyway is a small building. Across the width of it is a wooden garage door, a smaller door is cut into it, but the structure has a low wall in front of it, behind which a number of wheelie bins are lined up, blocking the whole entrance. We stand for a moment looking at it before Hughes pushes through the gate and disappears down the alley. There’s a shout a few seconds later.
“There’s another door here,” she says. Labinjoh runs after her, and I’m close behind. At the end of the alley, at the back of a house that I presume must belong to Nicole, there’s a side door leading into the small building with the garage door. The detectives take it in turns to push at it, but it doesn’t budge, and there’s no reply when they thump on it, asking if anyone is inside. I’m shouting too, calling out Robin’s name, an edge of desperation in my voice.
The detectives give up on the door and return to the car. I move forward to take their place and thump at the door a few more times, beating my fists against the wood, until the police come back and push me out of the way, down the alleyway back toward the road. Hughes is carrying a small battering ram, the kind that I’ve only ever seen on TV police dramas. She shouts a warning, runs and swings it at the door once, twice, and suddenly it’s open and they’re in, the ram dropped to the ground with a clang.
Hughes is in first, Labinjoh straight after. I’m at the back. But when I hear Hughes shout out I leap forward, pushing Labinjoh out of the way, and follow Hughes up a flight of stairs to see her kneeling on the floor next to a pile of rags. A pile of rags surrounded by hundreds of dead flies. Drifts of them, more than I’ve ever seen gathered like this in my life before.
I’m focusing on the wrong thing. The flies don’t matter. Because Hughes is doing something with the pile of rags, sorting through it, lifting up blankets and scraps of material. She pushes the whole lot back and bends down and it’s now that I see what she’s found.
Who she’s found…
I run over and kneel down beside her, next to my daughter as she lies on the floor, her lips blue. I start to sob, a keening sound, as I reach out and takes Robin’s hand.
It’s cold.
AFTERWARD
I’m as cold as a corpse.
The flowers are white and the coffin is white too, little pink flowers painted all over it. She’d have liked it. Pretty, just like she was. A tear slides down my cheek. Another. I can’t remember a time now when I haven’t been crying.
I clutch my hands together as the reading begins: Jesus, suffer the little children. It’s the wrong way round. The little children suffer. How they suffer. Forced to sing and dance on command, live out their parents’ hopes, dreams. Fix all their failures.
I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
I look at the spray of flowers on top of the white painted box. Not lilies, the waxen petals heavy and cloying, but bright, cheerful sunflowers, freesias, sprays of green ivy woven through the flowers, bright against the white paint, a delicate scent spreading through the church. All her favorite flowers.
The readings stop and the hymns stop and now there’s nothing left to stop the conveyor belt moving the coffin into the flames. They take off the flowers, putting them carefully on the floor, and I want to scream at them to stop, no one cares about the flowers, just get her out of the box, get her out.
I don’t scream. I bite my lip so hard it bleeds.
The curtain pulls back, the coffin moves through the gap.
The curtain closes. The scent of freesias sticks in my throat. I get up, walk out of the crematorium, into the sunshine that’s bright and warm, but my eyes are dark and I stumble, fall.
55
“I know you have other things on your mind,” Zora tells me over the phone some time later. “But I thought you’d like to know what happened in the trial.”
I shrug.
“He pleaded guilty. To every charge. There was uproar in court.”
“Right,” I say. “Right. Well, that’s something. I didn’t think he’d have the courage.” It feels as if all that happened a lifetime ago.
“He went into the witness box to give his evidence, and instead of saying what we’d rehearsed, he told the court that everything was true.”
Something stirs inside me, a small twinge of emotion. “And what happened?”
“The judge asked if he was changing his plea, and he said yes. He also yelled out to the whole court that it was down to his father and his QC that he’d kept the plea of not guilty going for so long.”
“Wow,” I say. I can almost imagine it, their faces puce with rage, their professional integrity torn to pieces.
“I didn’t know anything about it, you know,” Zora says. “I want to be absolutely clear with you about that. I would never have carried out a defense on that basis.”
“I know,” I say. “Jeremy did say it was his father who was the main instigator of this. Not that Barbara did anything to counter it.”
“Protecting their own,” Zora says. “No integrity.”
“That poor girl,” I say.
“Yes, that poor girl.”
We’re both silent for a moment. I think about Freya, how bravely she gave her evidence. Then I take in a breath.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you I found the book. It was incredibly stupid of me. I should have known better. It was all very… difficult.” Remembering that terrible weekend, I suppress a shiver. “So what happens now?” I say.
“He’ll be sentenced in a few weeks. And I’ve made a complaint to your chambers and to the Bar Standards Board about the way this has been carried out. Frankly, I’m appalled.”
“Good.”
“He’ll have to do his own mitigation, too. Or get someone else. We’re off the case,” Zora says. Another pause. “I don’t know what your plans for work are, Sadie. If you want to go back into that chambers. Or if you were interested in a job with us. But we always need good people. There are lots of trial opportunities, and it might be more flexible for you. In any event, I’ve told David I intend to instruct on every possible occasion.”
I consider this for a moment, file it away. I’ll think about it in time. Not now.
“What’s happened to Freya?” I ask. “Did you see how she reacted?”
“I heard her crying in the public gallery,” Zora says. “I looked round and saw her. Something you might be pleased to hear, though. Her mother was with her, with her arm around her. I think they might be all right.”
“Good,” I say. I’m about to hang up, but then I stop. “Zora, I just want to say thank you. For everything you did. You’ve been a fantastic friend. I don’t know when I’ll feel up to it, but I’d love to work with you. But can we make sure we’re not representing any more arseholes?”
Zora laughs. “You know I can’t give that guarantee.”
“True. Very true.”
56
Robin stirs. She’s waking up. I lie next to her, looking at her face as she gradually opens her eyes. She’s slept in my bed since we got her home from hospital, though she’s starting to play on her own a bit more. She still hasn’t gone back to school, though she says she’s nearly ready.
I find the warmth of her presence a comfort, too. My frayed nerves are starting to heal, my cortisol levels sinking back to normal. It’s a mammalian instinct, this need to lie in a pack, back to back against the night. Sometimes I lie awake in the dark, listening to Robin breathe, and I imagine what it must have been like in that dark outhouse. Robin doesn’t speak about it, can’t remember. Or won’t. I hope that she never woke and tried to seek comfort, looking for me and finding no one there.
I read about an experiment once, baby monkeys ripped from their mothers and caged with a wire frame as a surrogate, unmoving and unmoved by their cries. It cut me to the core, the cries of the baby monkeys so loud in my mind it was deafening. My own mother was that hard, that unyielding. I would try time and time again to speak to her, get her to notice me. But I was too often a disappointment, never good enough. My mother could spend weeks in the same house as me, cooking for me, washing my clothes, but never once making eye contact with me.
Once Robin wakes up fully, we get dressed and go upstairs to my old bedroom. It’s time. We discussed it the night before. We’re going to be quick, brutal. It’s got the best view in the house, high up in the eaves. I look out over the garden, at the pots of bright cyclamen I’ve planted up for the winter. There’ll be daffodils there when it’s spring, crocuses and snowdrops, too. Perfect for Robin. We’ll reclaim the space, break the stranglehold of hate. And it doesn’t take long to finish the job I started all those weeks ago.
“Do you want me to take that rubbish down?” Andrew asks as he climbs up the stairs. “I’ve got rid of four bags already from your room.”
I hand him the junk that we’ve sorted so far and I listen to him thudding his way down to the front door, his feet heavy on the stairs. Your room, he’d said. He’s still on the sofa in the living room. It’s for Robin’s benefit he’s here, that’s all. That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway.
Robin has been digging through drawers on the other side of the room. We’ve got past our initial horror at what Lydia did, finding it almost funny now.
“She must have hammered at this bit with a shoe or something,” Robin says, showing me the crushed plastic head of a baby doll. One of the eyes has gone entirely, the other is sticking out of its socket at an alarming angle. “It’s amazing.”
We continue to work in silence. I find some pages of Where the Wild Things Are that are more or less intact and I try to piece them back together, thinking about how happy I would have been to be in a home where I was loved, best of all.
“Mom,” Robin says, breaking my concentration. “Mom,” she says again. “Look at this.”
I look up. She’s holding an old shoebox. “What’s that?”
“It was in the bottom drawer. It isn’t damaged at all.”
“Wow, probably the only thing in this room that isn’t,” I say and we both laugh. Robin picks her way across the littered floor and hands the box to me and we look at it together. “I’m almost scared to look inside,” I say. “What do you think it’ll be? A dead toad? A severed toe?”
“Maybe it’s an ox’s heart full of nails, like the witches used to make,” Robin says, her eyes round and ghoulish.
It’s tempting to leave it, throw it straight into a rubbish bag and never think of it again. But I know the thought of it will haunt me. I take a deep breath, get a grip on myself. I know full well the depths of my mother’s malice—there’s nothing she can do now that has the power to hurt me.
“Come on, Mom, get it over with,” Robin says, and I brace myself, take off the lid.
“Oh,” I say. And “Oh,” again, my hand flying up to my mouth to cover it, winded.
“What is it?” Robin says. “Here, let me see.”
She reaches into the box and pulls out the matryoshka doll that I remember from so many years ago. I watched my mother smash it into pieces, the tendons in her neck straining with the force as she wielded the hammer.
“I thought you said it was broken,” Robin says. The doll has come out of the box in one piece. I take it from her and trace my fingers over the joins, the small smudges of glue.
“She must have mended it,” I say, and there’s a ripple in the air somehow, a loosening.
“This is going to be a lovely room,” Robin says, and she stands close to me and hugs me.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew says, later that day. I look at him.
“I know.”
“Do you think you’ll be able to forgive me?”
I keep looking at him, and he looks back. We hold the gaze for a long time.
“Will you go back to chambers?” Andrew asks, later still.
“One of us is going to need to earn some money,” I say. “Now you’ve turned supergrass and had your boss arrested and lost your work visa.”
“We can make it work,” he says. “It’s your turn now. I’m here.”
“I’m not sure,” I repeat. “I don’t know if I want to stay here, either.” I gesture around at the kitchen. “Not that we can go back to the U.S.”
“Over my dead body. Anyway, even if we could, I’m not sure Robin would let that happen,” Andrew says. He laughs. After a moment, I laugh too.
“What’s so funny?” a voice says from the front room, and then Robin’s there, in front of us. Still pale, still a bit underweight from the time she spent in hospital. But all right. Completely all right.
“Your mother is suggesting we move back to America,” Andrew says. “I wasn’t sure you’d be up for the idea.”
“No way!” she says. “I’m not moving again. I like it here. I like school. Can we stay?”
I look at them both and smile. It’s as if none of it ever happened. The shadow has passed from Robin, though I don’t think I’ll ever be free of it myself, the touch of Robin’s hand so cold on mine those weeks ago still lingering on my skin.
It all moved at such speed after we found Robin that it’s taken me a while to process exactly what happened. An ambulance arrived and she was bundled into it. From the lowness of her temperature, the traces of blood on her head, I was convinced at first that she was dead, but a faint pulse was detected. It took some weeks for her to make a full recovery, however, and for the tranquilizers with which she’d been drugged to work their way out of her system.
“If you’d found her any later, it would have been too late,” one of the doctors in hospital said to me. “Or if she’d been given any more. She’s been lucky, all things considered.”
I look at her now, bouncing around the house with Andrew. Very lucky indeed. Not like poor Daisy. Her funeral was one of the saddest events that I’ve ever attended. It broke my heart to watch Paul at the front of the crematorium, head bowed in despair, Nicole next to him. They’re growing close, Nicole and Paul. It seems to be bringing him some comfort.
I can’t begin to imagine how Julia must be feeling. But nothing about her makes any sense. It’s unimaginable that someone could have been so eaten up with ambition for their child that they would be prepared to kill the competition. But this is exactly what’s happened.
Julia is currently remanded in custody charged with the involuntary manslaughter of Daisy, and the false imprisonment and attempted murder of Robin. Nicole’s text to me at the time that we found Robin in the secret house was to tell us that she’d lost the keys to the building; Julia had visited the house some years previously and knew about the rooms at the back. She must’ve pocketed the keys when she had the chance. Nicole didn’t think to mention it before—it simply didn’t occur to her that Robin could be hidden there.
Fibers from the clothe
s Julia was wearing were found by forensics all over Robin’s clothes, her fingerprints on the keys that were eventually found in Julia’s handbag, and on an empty packet of tranquilizers of the sort used to drug both Daisy and Robin, thrown away in the bin outside Julia’s house, with Julia’s name on the label.
Julia is pleading guilty to the involuntary manslaughter of her daughter, the police have told me. She says she’s devastated, that she’ll never forgive herself for what happened. She’s said not guilty to any charge relating to Robin. So far. But she’s provided no alternative explanation. It probably doesn’t matter to her any more in the face of Daisy’s death. She seems to have given up any real attempt to defend herself.
The police are working on the theory that, overcome with grief and guilt at Daisy’s coma, she decided in the heat of the moment to take Robin, blaming her for disturbing the balance of the class. Once she got Robin up first thing on the Sunday morning, she gave her a spiked drink and bashed her over the head before hiding her in the property next to Nicole’s house.
I’ll never know what was going through her head, though I’ve tried to work it out. To drug Daisy—well, there was a logic there, in a dark, twisted way. Julia’s drive to succeed was ruthless. It was clear she’d stop at nothing. Until Robin came into the class, Daisy was guaranteed to win the scholarship, be recognized as the best. Robin kept beating Daisy in the maths tests—maybe this was why Julia kept giving more and more drugs to her daughter, artificially gearing her up, calming her down, until it all went too far. She must have thought it was all Robin’s fault. So when she saw her chance to take her revenge on Robin, make her suffer as much as Daisy, she grabbed it with both hands.
I look at my daughter now. The resilience of youth. She’s bounced back entirely, only a small mark on her head. No other scars. Nothing. She won’t even have to do the senior school exams—Ashams has been so shaken by the scandal that they’ve suspended the entrance procedure for girls currently at the junior school. Admission to the senior school will now be automatic.
