Two Little Girls: A totally gripping psychological thriller with a twist

by Frances Vick

  Lee’s face was drawn, and his eyes were grave. ‘Because that can really fuck a person up, Kirsty.’

  ‘I’m not.’

  He paused for a long time. Then went over to the computer, slammed the lid shut. ‘I don’t want you to look at this stuff again. I don’t want you to, OK?’

  She reached for humour. ‘You’re forbidding me? How are things in the 1800s, Lee?’

  ‘I mean it. Stop it. For me.’

  ‘It’s not that easy though…’

  ‘It’s easy if you try,’ he muttered.

  ‘I do try.’

  ‘No.’ He shook his head grimly. ‘You want to wallow in it, that’s what I think.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’ Kirsty felt sharp tears. The clean, sharp outlines of his face blurred. ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘It is fair. It’s just not what you want to hear. Get rid of this crap, OK? No more.’

  Lee and Kirsty didn’t argue often, and the arguments they had never lasted long. This one, so early in their relationship and ostensibly over within half an hour, was the worst because it changed their relationship forever, setting it on a fault line of lies: Kirsty not only didn’t erase the files, she added to them. Behind Lee’s back, she spent the next ten years collecting every YouTube clip, every Reddit thread, and every passing mention of the case in any media. Her mind yammered at her: Get ahead of the story and you can control the story; capture everything and lock it up; keep the Bad Thing in the cage, and kill it with its own poison.

  She was in control, or so she believed, for a long time.

  And then, she wasn’t.

  Ten

  ‘I’m pregnant!’ Vic screamed over the phone.

  ‘Oh my god.’ Kirsty sat down too quickly on a kitchen chair. She felt as if she’d been punched.

  ‘Three months! Nearly to the day. Ollie’s mum swears it’s a boy from how sick I am, but I really really feel like she’s a girl? I don’t know why – it’s just a weird feeling I have. Like, a real intuition. You know I get those.’

  ‘Ollie’s parents know?’ Kirsty heard her voice, faint, thin, as if it was coming from a cheap speaker.

  ‘Well, god, yes! Right from the start. They’re lovely, they’re so involved. They wanted to see the test itself but I told them I’d thrown it away because, you know, it’s all covered in wee.’

  The words, still thin but quavering, fell out of Kirsty’s mouth before she had a chance to think. ‘You told them before you told me?’

  There was a pause. ‘Well, yes? They live round the corner, practically.’ Vic and Ollie had recently moved north to Marsden, a chichi village some ten miles outside Vic and Kirsty’s home town. They’d bought a huge doer-upper of a house (Two buildings and a barn, as Vic always reminded her) that they were converting into one ugly vanity project. ‘I mean, how could I not tell them? They’re family?’ She gave a little incredulous I-can’t-believe-you’re-being-this-rude giggle.

  ‘I’m your family! I’m your sister!’

  Another pause. Then Vic said, with injured dignity, ‘I couldn’t though, could I? Not until I knew I was… you know, OK. Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester—’

  ‘I know that,’ Kirsty said frostily.

  ‘And I know you know that, that’s why I wasn’t going to tell you right away. To spare your feelings, after – you know… your… problems.’ The pause she left after ‘problems’ was filled with hurt. ‘I was just being sensitive!’

  Kirsty’s problems. Never her and Lee’s problems, but always Kirsty’s. Everyone saw it that way, everyone except Lee, who was scrupulous to reassure her that it would happen one day. Some couples don’t get pregnant for years, and then it just happens; some people are pregnant and don’t know – the tests are wrong… you hear about that all the time.

  ‘What, the “I Thought I Needed a Poo and Instead I Had a Baby!” stories in Take a Break?’ Kirsty could still smile about it in the early years.

  ‘I saw one the other day: “My Hangover from Hell Was Twins!”’

  ‘“Gluten Intolerance or Pregnancy?”’

  ‘“Ten Tell-Tale Signs Your IBS Is Really Your Baby.”

  ‘That’s not a real one! Come on, is it?’ Kirsty said.

  Lee nodded solemnly. ‘“Local Woman Discovers One Weird Trick—”’

  ‘“To Never Get Pregnant,”’ Kirsty finished bitterly.

  Every time Lee sat beside her, took the negative test from her hand, and snapped it in half with one brisk gesture. Every time he told her, ‘It will happen. It will.’

  But it didn’t.

  They were both tested and they were both fertile. It made no sense. They should try to relax, up their vitamins, keep an ovulation calendar. Lee even stopped smoking. But nothing changed. Every period felt like a little death with no coffin, and they were both so hyperaware of the other’s sadness that they couldn’t share their own. The rueful jokes stopped, silly baby-name discussions (‘Herod! Clytemnestra!’) ended, and when Lee started smoking again, Kirsty said nothing and neither did he.

  And now, here was Vic, seven years her junior and pregnant without a hitch. Kirsty tried so hard not to cry on the phone, and when she failed, she managed to pass off the tears as tears of joy. Vic was mollified, and they parted friends, but as soon as she put the phone down she collapsed. Lee found her curled up on the bed an hour later, rigid as a mummy, wet eyes wide. He lay down with her silently, and they clung to each other like wreckage, not saying a word.

  After a while she told him she couldn’t carry on working in Child Protection. She couldn’t carry on seeing these awful, damaged, wilfully shit parents, pumping out kid after kid, with no thought or care or…

  ‘I’ve had enough.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Just… I don’t know. I’ll retrain? Or go into Adult Services?’

  ‘Whatever you need to do, love.’ Lee stroked her hair. ‘Whatever makes things easier.’

  Like always, love for Lee rose up, washed away the scum of numb depression, and if she was strong, he was strong. That was the way it was with them. They had each other’s back, and they always would. Thank god for Lee.

  Vic’s pregnancy was not straightforward. There were sudden spikes in blood pressure, bleeding. The childless, mannish midwife told them, with sad delight, that the baby was small, that Vic would have to be monitored and looked after. Vic promptly prescribed herself bed rest for the remaining five months, and suddenly realised how much she needed her sister, her one living relative!

  ‘What about Ollie’s parents? I thought they were really involved?’ Kirsty couldn’t resist asking.

  Vic’s reply was both pathetic and heartening. ‘They’re old though, and they do my head in. Please, Kirsty? You’re the only one I trust to get me through this. You’re so calm and practical and fun. Ollie’s great but he’s so… he tries so hard to be careful that he ends up fussing and if you’re not working at the moment…?’

  ‘I can’t just leave Lee though.’ It wasn’t just that.

  ‘Well, what if we find more work for Lee? He’s already going to be doing the staircase.’

  This was true. Ollie had brought Lee in to build the new staircases complete with clever, hidden shelving units, and Vic also had her heart set on a bespoke shoe cupboard. (‘If I hear her use the words “girly”, “sparkly” or say anything about Sex and The City, I’m walking off the job,’ Lee told Kirsty.)

  ‘What if we find more stuff for him to do? That means you’ll see more of him if you stay here, won’t you?’

  And so Kirsty agreed. They could do with the money now she’d resigned, and, secretly, she was flattered to be asked. It made sense, it would be nice. Family time. Lee, however, wasn’t convinced. He didn’t want Kirsty anywhere near ‘That Place’. It wasn’t good for her, what with all those memories, all that horror, but Kirsty told him that she was hardly going to go back there and socialise with anyone, was she? She didn’t know anyone there anyway – after all, she left when she was
eleven. No, she’d just stay with Vic – a safe ten miles away from the city – until the baby came, that’s all. It would be nice.

  * * *

  And it was nice. Vic, chastened by illness, was good company. They watched movies together, they went through pictures of Sarah, of themselves when they were small, deciding on which to get framed, talking about where they should hang. When she didn’t have an audience, Vic was actually a lot of fun. She dropped the ditsy persona and showed a sly observant humour that Kirsty hadn’t suspected she had; Ollie’s octogenarian parents were a lot more entertaining after they’d left and Vic was imitating them for Kirsty’s amusement. She even poked gentle fun at herself… A long-time devotee of what she called ‘the spiritual’, Vic spent her days in bed hoovering up books on astrology, near-death experiences, past lives; she would sometimes read out passages to Kirsty, who’d roll her eyes and smirk.

  ‘Typical Aquarius!’ Vic said, poking Kirsty playfully.

  ‘I’m not Aquarius though. I’m Pisces, aren’t I?’

  ‘That’s just what a typical Capricorn would say.’

  Vic, bed-bound, ordered mood lamps and chakra-bonded pyramids and intuition oil (‘I’ll use it in labour’), and in all this she was indulgently encouraged by Ollie. For fifteen years he’d lived with his ex-wife in blameless, dour domesticity, until this young woman – this impossibly flighty, attractive girl – had made him want more, and now that he had her, he was determined to take her every whim seriously.

  Vic’s beliefs, omnivorous and facile as they were, had honest, serious roots. She missed Sarah. Maybe Mum was still here, watching over them? What if their palms, their auras, their pasts and futures could tell them that? What if the baby itself was in some part a link with Sarah; what if she contained in herself a spark of her grandmother? It was this deeply felt love that allowed Kirsty to respect her beliefs, and, if not altogether share them, at least see how they could be a comfort to those left behind. Kirsty missed Sarah terribly too, and now, with the baby coming, it seemed doubly cruel that she wasn’t there. Some of the books Vic pressed onto Kirsty were even quite useful (not that she’d ever admit that to Lee, who maintained his scornful mistrust of ‘woo-woo’ in all its forms). The Power of Now, for example, had a lot in common with those books on mindfulness Kirsty had at home; she recognised a lot of herself between the pages of The Awakened Empath. If Vic wanted to take it one step further and pay to get her chakras balanced, her aura read, and her future spelled out by tarot cards, what was the harm if it brought down her blood pressure, helped her carry the baby to full term? And maybe there was some, tiny, element of truth in the whole thing?

  ‘It’s so nice, you being here,’ Vic told her. ‘It’s like we’re proper sisters again, isn’t it? Like when we moved and we had to share a room, remember? I had bad dreams and you’d give me a cuddle, remember?’

  Kirsty didn’t remember that. It seemed like a conflation of her own life and Vic’s dewy-eyed recollection of some idealised sisterhood. As far as she remembered, it was Kirsty who’d had nightmares, not Vic; Kirsty who’d crawl into her sister’s bed, pulling her sleeping body in close so she could hear her breathing, feel her heartbeat, using Vic’s life to chase away the dead girl she dreamed of. But it might have happened the way Vic said too – she was so sure of it, and it was a nice memory to have, even if it was, possibly, false.

  ‘I do remember that.’

  ‘It was nice, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘I read something the other day – listen.’ She opened a book named Spiritual Sisters: A Lifetime Odyssey: ‘“Sisters carry their mothers within them, just as they were carried in their mother womb. While some see life as unspooling in a straight line, the Spiritual Woman knows, deep in her womb, that there is no past and no future, just a continuous circle of love passed from mother to mother.”’

  She snapped the book shut. ‘Isn’t that lovely?’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  ‘And, you know what? The further I get along with the pregnancy? The more I feel Mum here, don’t you? I really, really feel her here!’ She was weeping a little now. ‘And you do, too, don’t you?’ Vic had lost weight recently, her face was drawn, her eyes ringed with brown. She was thin as a stick until the belly, swelling grotesquely below her flat breasts. It was as if the baby was sucking the life out of her. ‘Do you think she’s proud of me?’

  ‘Of course she is!’ Kirsty said warmly. ‘We all are!’

  ‘I’m scared I won’t be good at it, you know, being a mum. I won’t know what to do… You’re better than me at that stuff, you’re practical. Like Mum.’

  ‘Vic, you’re going to be all right. You are. I’m sure every mother goes through this – the doubt and the fear and all that – but you can do this.’

  ‘Will you stay for a while after the baby comes? I mean, there’s loads of room, and Lee can stay too, of course.’ Vic stared at her piteously with those huge, tired eyes. ‘Please? At least think about it?’

  Kirsty decided to sidestep answering for the moment. ‘What does it say in the baby books about this? Feeling scared?’

  ‘Oh. The baby books are stupid,’ Vic said petulantly. ‘It’s all routine, routine, routine, like the army of something. It’s all about the baby, nothing about the mother. There’s nothing about self-care.’

  ‘Are there any prenatal groups you could join or something?’

  Vic rolled her eyes in disappointment. ‘How can I when I’m stuck here?’

  ‘Internet groups then? Support groups?’

  ‘I want to be a person! Not just a pregnant lady,’ Vic answered grumpily. ‘You don’t know what it’s like!’

  Kirsty nodded. She didn’t. She wished she did.

  ‘And it’s not the same as family, is it? I mean, in the olden days, all the generations would live together, like a commune, and they’d all look after each other’s kids and, like, learn from each other and…’ She squeezed Kirsty’s hand. ‘Just think about it?’

  ‘What would Ollie say to that?’ asked Kirsty with a smile, playing for time.

  ‘Oh.’ Vic made a dismissive movement with one thin hand. ‘He’ll do whatever I tell him to do.’

  By the last trimester, Vic deemed herself well enough to leave the house. She spent most of her time having her chakras balanced, going to reiki and homeopathy consultations and hypnobirthing sessions. She saw palmists, crystal healers and, latterly, a tarot card reader. It was this last that brought Angela Bright into both their lives.

  Eleven

  ‘I met this wonderful lady!’ Vic was sitting up. ‘There was this flyer? At hypnobirthing? Tarot readings. Well, I know it’s a bit old school, tarot, but it made me think that I really ought to have one for the new baby? So I called and I met this adorable old lady. Like something out of a fairy tale! Anyway, I met her and she gave me the most lovely reading – look! I made notes!’

  Kirsty had time to glance at a page of Vic’s cramped, childish handwriting, covering half a side of A4 before it was pulled away again.

  ‘Anyway, she thinks, like we do, that a baby is really the child of all the women in the family, so she asked questions about me, and you, and even Mum…’

  ‘What kind of things did you tell her?’ Kirsty asked doubtfully.

  ‘Nothing personal!’ Vic told her. ‘It was for the baby, not for you. God. Anyway, then I asked her loads of questions too and it turned out that her daughter is a psychic – a really, really successful one too – in America. Read this.’ Vic pushed the iPad into Kirsty’s hands. ‘Click here.’

  Born in Ireland (the Emerald Isle), Angela Bright comes from a long, distinguished line of mediums, all the way back to medieval times. She accepted her gift at four years old, when her sister Lily, who had passed over years before, became her teacher and guide to Spirit.

  For more than a decade, Angela has been using her gift to deliver healing to the world. She was one of the world-renowned mediums appearing regularly on TLC’s The Bridg
e to Beyond. Angela tours nationally as well as lending her talents to Hollywood moguls, and stars of screen and TV alike.

  She can be contacted for individual readings, remote reading and house cleansings.

  A studio portrait of Angela showed a woman in her mid-thirties, slim, with a no-nonsense dark blonde bob and a pair of soulful eyes and a sad smile.

  ‘OK, guess what?’ Vic was fizzing with excitement.

  ‘What?’ Kirsty was nervous.

  ‘She’s coming here! Angela Bright!’

  ‘All the way from the Emerald Isle?’

  Vic ignored her. ‘You’ve got to see this!’ she said and she tapped on the YouTube link below, a montage of Angela’s appearances on The Bridge to Beyond, which seemed to be some kind of psychic detective tag-team affair.

  On camera Angela Bright came across as a kind of psychic Mary Poppins, brisk, yes, but partial to holding hands and murmuring endearments in a slightly overdone accent that couldn’t be firmly placed as belonging to anywhere in the UK. ‘I need you to help me understand’ was one of her catchphrases, and, unlike the two other mediums, she wasn’t given to double-takes and humorous banter with visiting spirits. Angela didn’t play to camera; whether striding through a misty graveyard in Yonkers, or staying the night at a haunted motel in Maine, she took it very seriously, gave it her all, and seemed to suffer for it. The body of the little boy was not found, but an exhausted Angela told his parents ‘he had found peace’. The noisy spirit upsetting guests in a country hotel was quelled with kindness, as Angela listened to something in the silence, rocked, cried, before telling the owners that the place was now Clean. ‘This spirit was strong, and yes, she was angry, but it all came from pain. There was a loss of a baby, perhaps in that room itself, and she couldn’t move on. She just wanted someone to hear her.’ Angela’s eyes were watering while the background music swelled to a soupy sadness. ‘So many women were left alone, left friendless. That pain doesn’t go away. Not without help.’ Kirsty was slightly ashamed to notice that she, too, had tears in her eyes.