by Frances Vick
Bryan carried on haunting her. When she went to secondary school, the phantom of his hate, along with the uneasy interest of her new classmates, changed her from a normal little girl to a frightened, dark-faced ghost. She had no friends and she didn’t want any either… look what happened to her last friend. Sometimes she couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t face going to school and could she stay at home and look after Baby Vicky, please? But Baby Vicky would be going to school soon. Time was moving on, things were changing. The only thing that wasn’t changing was Kirsty.
Later, she could see an ironic corollary between herself and Bryan: they were both, in their own ways, trapped by what had happened, like a bug in hardening sap. At least Kirsty eventually left town. Over the next few years, Bryan watched as his compatriots moved on, grew up, matured, while he stayed exactly the same. After a while he was only able to command the attention and respect of those far younger and arguably even stupider than him, but even these cronies, too, outgrew him. Not a month went by without him appearing in the court section of the local paper, but his crimes crossed the line of pathos from violence to necessity. Shoplifting alcohol and ready-made sandwiches from Tesco Metro, aggressive begging, non-payment of court fines.
Kirsty didn’t witness this latter first-hand though. By the summer of 1986, Sarah had spent more than a year watching her daughter getting stripped to the bone by gossips, conspiracy theorists and aggressive well-wishers, grimly waiting for it to pass, but now she’d had enough. She made the decision to move, move far away. It would be Kirsty’s best chance to get over ‘that business’. It was only much later, when Kirsty was an adult herself, that she fully fathomed how hard this must have been; Sarah had left her own settled life in a city she herself was born in, to give Kirsty this chance. However meagre the support she received from her ex-husband was, it was still something, and Sarah had nothing to go to – no family, no friends, no job, but she refused to let any of that faze her; Kirsty had to be Safe. End of story.
‘And you can still see your dad in the holidays. Hop on the train? It’ll be exciting!’
And that did happen, once or twice, before Dad receded too, consumed by his own – new – family who didn’t welcome Kirsty and weren’t shy about letting her know. Sarah tried hard to hide the angry phone calls during which she remonstrated with him, shed angry tears, until finally Kirsty told her not to bother any more. ‘You’re the only parent I need, Mum; I don’t even know him.’ It was designed to make Sarah happy, but it was also true. Sarah was big and brave enough to – almost – fill any shadowy gap.
Down south, Kirsty’s accent caused giggles, so she learned to change it, lengthen her vowels and use different slang. She made some friends, called herself Kirsten. Baby Vicky became Victoria, Mum could answer the phone without fear, and there were no more notes. Life was better, it became, often, good. But despite all this, Kirsty never felt fully safe again. She was still trapped, partially living in the past, in the shadows of half memory.
One day, when she was about fourteen, she was suffering through an especially dull school assembly led by the local vicar, when one phrase wiggled out of his pious drone and into her mind: The truth will set you free. This pairing of truth and freedom was something she’d never thought of before; after all, experience had taught her that truth was cloudy, frightening, slippery, something that adults were better stewards of than children. Now though, the older she got, the more doubts she had… The way she thought about it now, it was obvious that the police had been under pressure to get an arrest, and they’d known who they wanted to arrest, they just needed a reason. Kirsty had provided the reason and had been coached and cajoled into strengthening their case. After Tokki retracted his confession it had become clear that everything was precariously based on what Kirsty had told them which was based in turn on what Lisa had told her – these breathless tales of stolen kisses and forbidden love, of princesses and jewels, had been translated as grooming, as abuse. But that didn’t mean it was true, did it? Why would Lisa being engaged to Tokki be true, when the swimming with dolphins and the uncle with a private plane wasn’t? How could the police happily consign some things into a bin marked ‘Fantasy’ while others – equally bizarre – were treated as absolute truth? Adults in authority were fallible, it seemed. But what if they were worse than fallible? What if they were corrupt?
There was another side to the case that so far she’d never seen. Tokki was black and foreign and Muslim. In a city that was predominantly white, English and (arguably) Christian, he, and all the other students from Marlborough House, stuck out. Looking back, there had been no black kids in Kirsty’s school, no black teachers, and before she’d had that brief, strangled conversation with the lodgers, she’d never spoken to anyone of colour in her life. Outside of Lenny Henry and Floella Benjamin there weren’t even any black faces on TV. For the first time Kirsty started to see the whole thing through the prism of race. How much of Lisa’s fascination with the lodgers had been based on their novelty, and how much of the things she’d said about them had come entirely from her imagination and half-heard comments about Lusty Africans? How much of the hysteria surrounding the case had come from the same thing? She remembered the little blonde girl shouting, ‘Go back to the jungle, you baboon!’ At the time it had been the word ‘cunt’ that had shocked her; the racism had slid by almost unnoticed. That was the way things were in that time and place. Had the police ever seriously thought of finding and charging anyone else? The town had its fair share of violent men, but had the police asked her any questions at all that hadn’t centred on Tokki? And where did that leave her? Even though she’d left that stagnant gene pool of a place, she’d never, ever questioned its narrative. And that made her culpable. Worse, it made her responsible.
So she started trawling through the detritus of her memory like a clear-eyed detective searching for the little shards of truth, hoping to catch enough to put them together like a shattered mirror, do what the police should have done and, in the process, free herself from guilt. She began keeping a case file.
Using the cumbersome microfiche machine in the library, she went through old newspaper reports on the case, copied everything as it was written and glued her notes neatly in a scrapbook. She photocopied maps of the area, of the park, the canal, Beacon Hill estate. She took the very few photographs she still had of herself and Lisa, covered them carefully with sticky plastic, and pinned them onto the pages, like frail moths. Eventually the scrapbook became so large and unwieldy that it had to be reorganised, then split into two, then three, then four. Later still she kept her notes on floppy disk and now, after more than twenty years, these voluminous files were all stored on a cloud… suitable for something dead and gone that still hovered over her and wasn’t going anywhere.
Eight
In June 1986, Tokki made his first suicide attempt by taking apart a toilet cistern, sharpening the siphon lever into a crude knife and jabbing it into his neck. The wound was superficial, but it led to headlines, an enquiry into prison safety and, inevitably, an upsurge in public interest into the Lisa Cook case. That same week, the two girls who’d claimed that they saw Tokki in the park when Lisa disappeared now said they weren’t sure they’d seen him after all. Maybe it was another black man? Or maybe not even a black man at all?
The following March, Tokki mounted his first appeal, which failed. Then, a few years later, also in March, Lisa’s father died – ‘of a broken heart!’ screamed the Sun – though actually of alcohol-induced liver disease that pre-dated Lisa’s disappearance. Her stepfather, Stuart, who had been more of a father to her than him, died only two years later, leaving Denise alone.
A decade later, there was that mini-series based on the case. Bryan told the papers he’d sue the production company over the depiction of his sister (‘They made her out to be a slut!’) and Tokki (‘He was portrayed like an African saint when we all know he’s a paedophile and a murderer. It’s PC gone mad!’) but predictably his threat went
nowhere. Later still, when DNA analysis became more reliable, Tokki was definitely ruled out as a suspect in the murder of Tracy Spellar, the girl by the railway tracks, and his legal team pushed again for the Lisa Cook case to be reopened. The request was refused, but now, with the advent of the internet, the case was starting to be discussed and picked over by the public again. In this pre-social-media universe, the Lisa Cook case lurked first on Area 51 in Geocities, along with alien sightings and Bigfoot cover-ups; it popped up on ghoulish AltaVista searches, on primitive blogs – one of which, much later, became DarkHearts.com, a site that Kirsty, like many others, became obsessed with. They wanted to get to the truth, and so did she. But what she hadn’t been prepared for was just how much of her life was on there, some of which she’d never seen before.
There she was in her pretty pink coat, leaving the police station – in the picture the coat was grey, smeared with thumbprints of over-handling. Who had cut this picture out of the paper, and kept it close enough to handle this frequently? Who had thought this picture was important enough to share with the world now? Here she was getting in the van on the day they finally moved away – it must have been taken with a long lens from across the street. Had one of the neighbours taken it, hoping to sell it? Old Mr Hyde? The Johnsons who used to give her sweets at Christmas? There was a photo of her outside the house Down South. She was in her new school uniform, nervously squint-smiling at the camera. Who could have sold that picture but Dad? She almost called him, before remembering that she didn’t have his new number. There she was with Lisa on their joint eighth birthday party, arm in arm, standing on tiptoes as if they were ballerinas. There they were up a tree – blurred in dungarees, half hidden in the leaves. When was this? Where was this? Bryan must have sold these. It seemed that Dark Hearts owned pieces of her she never knew she’d had. She wanted them back.
Her research wasn’t nostalgic, it was painful, even masochistic. Lee told her it wasn’t good for her, he’d been saying that from the very first time they met, and he was right. Lee was always looking out for her. He was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Thank god for Lee.
They had met nearly ten years ago at some godawful party Victoria (who now insisted on being called Vic) had thrown to celebrate… celebrate what? It could have been anything – a stair carpet, a new coat, the apocalypse… Vic, in those days, threw a party on any pretext, and they were always messy affairs. Without fail, there would be flaming sambuca shots, knots of sweaty fools, giggling over their NutraSweet-cut cocaine in the toilet, and by the early hours the bath would be splattered with vomit, the floor would be littered with broken glass, possibly a broken bone or two. These parties were devilish! Oh, they were messy/crazy/not-to-be-missed, and Kirsty hated them. She only went along because – well, she had to, didn’t she? She had her role to play, Vic needed keeping an eye on… Mum had made her promise.
Both sisters lived in London by then. Kirsty was working at Lambeth Social Services in Child Protection and Vic had followed her to the city, beginning a hospitality course at Metropolitan University, only to drop out halfway through the first year. Now she worked as an estate agent in property management, but had her eye on moving to sales. She wanted to snag one of those Mini Coopers they gave to top sellers. She’d already snagged someone else’s husband – a peaceable, pliable stockbroker called Ollie, who doted on her as if she was some rare, exotic pet.
Sarah doted on her too. Perhaps because she’d been so small when all ‘that business’ had happened, Vic was untainted with pain. Sarah could look at Vic and know she had no hard, ill-judged words to regret, nothing to look back on and think, ‘That’s where I failed.’ And so Vic inhabited the one sentimental spot in Sarah’s no-nonsense, practical mind, and she had to be swaddled at all times. When Vic moved to London, Sarah told Kirsty often to ‘Make sure she’s not too daft. Make sure she eats, keep an eye on her, will you?’ Sarah must have been ill by then, but it wasn’t her nature to talk about her fears or feelings to doctors or daughters. Kirsty only found out about the cancer when it was terminal, after Vic had married Ollie, and Sarah no longer needed to worry about her. In those earlier days though, Kirsty took her promise seriously. She made sure to meet Vic for drinks, first with her gaggle of student friends, and later with her ghastly colleagues from the estate agency, who were all blonde, all called silly things like Allegra, Clarissa or Thea, all conspicuously richer and more sophisticated than Vic. She had answered the phone at two a.m. and spent hours talking her drunken sister out of calling her latest ex (they all had silly names too: Harrison, Taylor, Tobias). She went to Vic’s parties, put in her hour or two of subtle supervision, and left before the glass started breaking.
Kirsty arrived at the party expecting exposed wires and rubble, or at least a bit of 1970s linoleum, but it was already fairly immaculate with big blank windows, shiny wood floors. Very grown-up. There were fewer trust-fund Clarissas there, more normal people, old enough to worry about keeping the babysitter up if they stayed too long. Ollie’s influence, she presumed. Vic herself was all kitsch suburban chic – decked out in an unfamiliar vintage dress, with a nipped-in waist and lace Peter Pan collar. Still, after a while, once the drink started flowing, she shook off a lot of that poise, and soon she was wheeling out the sambuca and pushing back the furniture so she could execute a clumsy forward-roll just like the old days. The music was turned up. Vic announced a dance-off in the hall, started organising teams. Usually that would be Kirsty’s cue to slip away, but it was only ten o’clock, and Vic would see her trying to leave. There was only one logical thing to do, and that was to hunker down in the kitchen, avoid the carnage that way.
Kirsty managed to edge into the kitchen, silently shutting the door behind her, then let out a long sigh and kicked her shoes off. The clunk of heels was loud on new tile, and a man, half hidden in the alcove beside the fridge, gasped and spun round, clutching his chest.
‘Jesus!’
‘Sorry,’ Kirsty muttered, irritated that there was someone else already in her bolthole, already bored with the possibility of having to have another trite, distasteful conversation. (‘Child Protection? Oh my god, how depressing! What’s the worst thing you’ve seen?’)
‘Christ, I thought I was safe!’ The man closed the fridge door with one hip, and passed her a beer. ‘Has the dancing started?’
‘No, not yet.’
‘Well, I’m not risking it. I’m staying here.’ The man crossed to the door, opened it a crack, peered out, closed it again. ‘Jesus. It’ll end up like one of those Oh So Crazy parties. “Yay! Look, I’m young again!”’ He waved both large, finely shaped hands in the air, his mouth open in idiot delight.
‘Like in one of those Brat Pack movies – the eighties ones,’ Kirsty agreed.
‘Yes!’ The man pointed to her with his bottle. ‘They’re horrible, those films, aren’t they? They’re a middle-aged man’s idea of a crazy party with crazy teenagers. Telly through the window, like that. If we’re lucky someone’ll try to breakdance and break a fucking hip.’
‘You have high expectations of this party, I can tell.’ Kirsty smiled. He wasn’t like most of Vic’s party guests; he was funny, confident enough in himself that he didn’t care about seeming eccentric, handsome enough to get away with it. ‘Wait for the flaming shots.’
‘Flaming shots! Of course there’ll be flaming shots! That train’s never late,’ the man replied. They exchanged lugubrious grins. ‘I’m Lee.’
‘Kirsty.’ They clinked bottles. ‘So how do you know Vic?’
‘I don’t know Vic. I know Ollie. I’ve worked on a few of his properties – joinery, bit of painting and decorating, stuff like that, and lately I’ve done a bit more bespoke stuff…’ Lee placed one finger on his cheek in exaggerated thought. ‘Perhaps I’m part of his divorce settlement? Anyway, I’m apparently his cut-out-and-keep working-class pal. I think he wants to improve my prospects. Called me last week, said he’d bought a new place and maybe I could take a
look. I got here tonight, and there’s some girl he’s lined up for me to meet.’
‘What was she like?’
Lee frowned. ‘Young. Loud. Called something stupid like Dementia or Chlamydia.’ He shook his head. ‘Nope.’
‘Is she still out there?’
‘As far as I know. I palmed her off on some chinless wonder and came to hide in here. I reckon if I give it another half hour I’m free.’ He drained his beer, opened another. ‘Why the hell are you here anyway? You seem better than this.’
‘Family duty. Vic’s my sister.’
Lee’s face dropped. ‘Shit. Shit, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s all right. I came to terms with it years ago.’
‘No, I mean I’m sorry for slagging off her boyfriend and all that…’
Kirsty smiled widely. ‘If you get me another beer I’ll keep my mouth shut. And I won’t deliver you to the tender mercies of your young, loud date.’
‘I doubt my young, loud date is tender or merciful. Here.’ He passed her an open bottle, pointed at the door, his mouth tugged down in amusement. ‘Your sister? Really?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Well.’ Lee shut the door, frowned humorously. ‘She’s very… lively.’
‘She’s the “crazy” one,’ Kirsty replied. ‘I’m the dull, older one.’
