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

by Frances Vick

  ‘Lee?’

  ‘Shit, love, where’ve you been?’ Lee’s voice boomed in the silence, all honest relief and love. ‘Are you OK? Are you sick? I called the hospital and they said you hadn’t come in today.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Lee,’ she was sobbing, ‘I’m so sorry, I said all those things to you and I, god, I’m sorry!’

  ‘Hey, hey, love, come on, come on, now.’ His voice was gentle, reassuring, as warm and alive as this room was desiccated and dead. ‘Where are you? What’s happened?’

  ‘I’m at Sylvia’s. You were right about her, Lee, she’s awful. She lied to me and—’

  ‘Come home now!’ he told her.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I’ll come and get you then! I’ll come right now—’

  ‘No, Lee, you can’t. It’s dangerous and you can’t—’

  ‘What d’you mean, dangerous?’ His voice was panicked now. ‘Are you hurt? What’s she done to you?’

  A car was approaching. ‘They’re coming back now. I have to go. Lee? I love you! And I’m sorry! I’ll… I’ll call you back when I can. I promise.’

  The car pulled up, the doors opened and slammed. Kirsty took up her post behind the door, put her phone on silent, and waited.

  ‘It’s warmer in here,’ Angela said. ‘I left the gas fire on.’

  They were in the little dining room now. Kirsty pressed record on her phone and very slowly, very gently, placed it on top of a pile of newspapers by the door. She could see, through a tiny crack in the door panel, Sylvia sitting on the sofa, rubbing her hands together.

  ‘Cold out there.’

  ‘Take your coat off. Sit closer to the fire. Do you want tea?’ Angela was unctuous. ‘Will that help?’

  ‘Oh, that’d be lovely.’

  It was… bizarre. There they were, each convinced – one of them correctly – that the other was a killer, and they were chatting about the weather like nothing had happened, like they were a normal mother and daughter. They sat and drank tea in what could easily pass as an amiable silence, and Kirsty felt a sudden, sick fear that somehow this was part of her torture, that nothing Angela had told her was true, that she was the master manipulator after all, that the whole thing would never be resolved, the truth would never be known.

  Then, as if she sensed her despair, Angela glanced at the door and nodded, just over Sylvia’s head. ‘Will you tell me now?’ she asked Sylvia.

  ‘What about?’

  ‘About Lisa Cook, what happened to her?’

  ‘Oh lord,’ Sylvia said with mild irritation. ‘Why do you have to ask about all that for?’

  ‘What harm can it do now, Mum? Look, I did… this thing, for you, right? Well, can you tell me what happened to Lisa? I know it wasn’t me, but, you know, you must have had a good reason for saying it was. I just want to put it behind us.’

  Sylvia sipped her tea meditatively. ‘It was your fault,’ she said eventually.

  Even from the next room, Kirsty could feel Angela’s exasperation, her despair that Sylvia was just going to trot out the same bizarre lie.

  ‘How was it? What happened? Mum, please? Come on…’

  ‘Well, maybe you’re right.’ Sylvia sounded a little bit satisfied, as if she liked to be begged, liked to show mercy every now and again. ‘It’s not like you can drop me in it any more, is it? And it was your fault, in a way. What were you doing running around in the dark with her anyway? I told you to stay in the club.’

  ‘You hit Lisa with the car?’

  ‘And you were lucky I didn’t hit you. I swerved when I saw you, and I hit her. Like I said, it was an accident, and if you hadn’t been out with her in the first place it would never have happened.’

  ‘I remember her being here though. In the kitchen?’

  ‘Well, that was your fault too. I thought I’d just leave her in the park, but you were crying and carrying on and so I put her in the back seat, brought her here.’

  ‘Why not the hospital?’

  Sylvia stared at her. ‘I didn’t have a driving licence, did you forget that titbit? Imagine taking her to hospital and them going, Oh, how did you get here then, and me saying, Oh I drove. Then they get a statement from me, find out I’m illegal, look at the dent in the car, and lock me up for murder and dangerous driving and I don’t know what else. And where would you have been then? Who would’ve looked after you? What was I supposed to do?’ She shook her head.

  Kirsty pressed her lips together, trying not to make a sound as the tears rolled down her face, dripping off her chin. Angela, too, was having trouble controlling her face. Kirsty watched as she got up, ostensibly to turn the fire down, but mainly to wipe away her own tears. Still with her back to Sylvia, she managed, in a remarkably steady voice, to congratulate her on having such good sense.

  ‘Well one of us had to.’ Sylvia was warming to the conversation now. Proving her own logic against others’ sentiment was obviously a favourite topic of hers. ‘Left to your own devices, you’d have told everyone and anyone about it.’

  ‘Is that why you… you had to tell me I’d hurt her? So I wouldn’t—’

  ‘Ruin it all? Yes. And, when all’s said and done, you did hurt her. I mean, it was your fault, wasn’t it? If you hadn’t been running around with her in the dark…’

  ‘And the coat? Did you put her coat by the canal?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m glad I did because they’d just arrested that man – the black man – what was his name?’

  ‘Toqueer Al-Balushi.’

  ‘God, that’s a mouthful, isn’t it? Well, they’d already got him, and so I thought the coat might push things along a bit.’

  ‘And it did.’

  ‘Yes, it did,’ Sylvia said with satisfaction. ‘Thank god.’

  ‘Where is she? Where’s Lisa’s body now then?’ Angela managed. Her voice was fogged with pain now, but Sylvia was too carried away with her own cleverness to hear it.

  ‘Under the house!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Where you put Kirsty! That’s quite neat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Neat.’

  ‘Scuppers the plans for building too, doesn’t it? Not moving now, am I? Can you imagine? The diggers uncovering that? We’d both be buggered, wouldn’t we?’

  ‘And Kirsty? How did she find out about Lisa?’

  ‘God knows! She was mental, that girl. Did I tell you she came round here a bit back, trying to break in? I was round the back and I saw her. I gave her the shock of her life though!’ She chuckled.

  ‘What’d you do?’

  ‘Well, Mervyn’s old Ford Focus is back there, so I jumped in it and I drove right at her! She got the shock of her life!’

  ‘And she didn’t see it was you?’

  ‘No, she was too busy crawling under the house like a rat. And I was too quick and my hair was covered, and—’ She cocked her head to the side. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cars.’ Sylvia walked into the kitchen. Angela cast a panicked look at the door, flapped one hand at Kirsty – Come!

  ‘Marie? Marie?’ Sylvia, panicked, called from the kitchen. ‘Tell me those cars aren’t coming this way! Marie! Oh for god’s sake, where are you?’

  And she came bustling back into the dining room, to find Angela and Kirsty standing side by side. Those cheeks, pinkened by unveiling her triumph by the humid gas fire, quivered, the colour drained, her face fell, like slack dough, from absolute control to pure shock. From behind her, the sound of the approaching cars was louder, their blue, flashing lights an ever-encroaching glare, and Sylvia stood absolutely still, rigid with rage, with cold, passionless hatred..

  ‘You. Fucking. Bitches,’ she muttered. Then she turned, snatched Angela’s bag from the table, and sped out of the front door. They heard the BMW jerking into life, the gears crunching, the skid of mud, and then the sirens started as one pair of blue lights turned to follow Sylvia, while the other stayed on course, the beams finding and settling on the still figures of Kirsty and Marie, s
tanding together at the doorway, the rain pounding the mud before them.

  Thirty-Eight

  It’s a strange thing to have lived through a catastrophic event that never actually happened. The ripples extend over years, until more suffering stems from yet more nothing. A fire destroys a building; an innocent man is imprisoned; two girls are condemned to years of fear and doubt; hundreds of people on the internet put their heads together to Solve the Case. So much guilt, so much hate, so much… noise is generated from one small horrible truth that no-one could know. But once this false narrative is ripped apart, what can fill it? Yet more narratives, of course.

  According to the police report, Sylvia lost control of the car just as she was about to get onto the main road running into Beacon Hill. With the police car behind her, she made one desperate attempt to make a swift right, the car skidded across the tarmac and hit a row of garages, sending the door of one straight through the windscreen and straight through Sylvia. This ‘Serious Incident’ in police parlance, became a ‘Tragic Accident’ in the unlikely words of an anonymous Beacon Hill resident to the local paper. By the next morning, local radio were calling it a ‘Desperate Police Chase Ending in Tragedy’, and by the evening it was snatched up by Dark Hearts as ‘New Lead in Cook Case? Car-chase drama may be the clue we’ve been waiting for.’ The story that unspooled over the next few weeks was dubbed ‘insane’, ‘confounding’ and ‘fucking nuts’ by all media, from the Guardian to Reddit. It was a bizarre, slow-burn shocker with something for everyone.

  Tokki was immediately released and quickly married one of the women who had faithfully written to him for years. He gave one newspaper interview, in which he put the swift turnaround of his fortunes down to the direct intervention of Jesus Christ (he’d recently, at the urging of his fiancée, converted to Christianity). The accompanying photo showed that he was bald now, fat, and seemingly all-contentment, despite those scars – the self-inflicted throat wound, the missing finger from an attack ten years ago, the deep hatching of scars on palms and forearms from fending off another. There were other, hidden scars too, shakes, nightmares, cold-stored hate for the people who did this to him and those who let people do this to him. It was rumoured, and then confirmed, that he would sue the police for an undisclosed sum in compensation. Nobody gets out of things whole, after all, but maybe money helps heal some of the wounds.

  Lisa’s body – dust and bone now, wrapped in linoleum and stuffed under Sylvia’s house – was retrieved with as much reverence as a forensic team could manage. A catastrophic head injury, a crushed ribcage, a dislocated shoulder. She had died immediately, long before Sylvia and Marie had got to the house, long before Marie, sobbing, was singing her to sleep and stroking her pretty hair. The funeral was very private, just Denise and Kirsty. Bryan was back in prison for breaching Mona’s prevention order in a typically self-indulgent, stupid way – throwing rocks through her window in full view of the neighbours. Denise was relieved he wasn’t there, Kirsty could tell. She sat rigidly through the short service and shed no tears, just clutched Kirsty’s hand, quickly, spasmodically, as the coffin trundled away and the red curtain drew around it. Kirsty dropped her off at home and offered to come in, but Denise said she had to get the lodgers’ tea ready, and she walked down her pathway squaring her broad shoulders, a solid, intensely private woman. People grieve differently, and Denise, as ever, grieved alone, silently. It was her way, too, of getting out whole.

  Angela and Kirsty had a different method. They knew that they wouldn’t be granted the luxury of privacy, and so they allowed their names, their faces and their life stories to be pored over. They posed for photographs and gave interviews – not many, but enough to prove that they had no regrets, no doubts, nothing to hide. Angela in particular was good at this; the transatlantic drawl was back, she knew how to stand in front of cameras with her back straight, her chin up. She knew how to look into a lens and tell it to trust her. Angela happily took the lead and Kirsty was grateful to her, grateful to be relegated to the role of Brave Sidekick, Plucky Assistant. Angela was so glamorous and Kirsty so honestly self-effacing that they were universally admired – even the grumpiest of trolls in the deepest crevices of Dark Hearts couldn’t fault either of them. Kirsty was – in a roundabout way – apologised to in a special posting entitled, ‘Why We Should Learn from Kirsty Cooper and Look Before We Leap (to Conclusions)’. Kirsty never read that post though, because she had no need to; the truth – most of it – the parts the public would want to know anyway – was out there now, and the ball was rolling. The press was already calling for a public enquiry, the tapes of Kirsty’s and Tokki’s questioning were already being pored over by the IPCC; heads might roll, pensions might be questioned, and papers would sell. As for the rest of the truth, Kirsty and Angela spent hours piecing that together, finding fact in the lies and the lies in… bigger lies.

  ‘Tell me about Star Child,’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Star Child? The organisation you went to when you were five? They taught you about tarot and crystals and—’

  ‘There was no Star Child,’ Angela told her. ‘She made all that up.’

  Later, Kirsty checked, and there was no evidence of any organisation called Star Child anywhere. It seemed that Sylvia had concocted it from half-read articles on Indigo Children and Scientology.

  ‘I suppose it gave the whole story a bit more colour,’ Angela said. ‘After all, she got to be the Mum Trying to Do the Right Thing Up Against a Shadowy Evil Cult. It’s… compelling, you have to admit. She was good at telling stories.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’re so calm about this,’ Kirsty said. ‘I don’t know why you’re not angry all the time.’

  ‘I used to be, but I turned it all in on myself. But then Peg stepped in. Once she’s on your side, she’s on your side, you know?’

  ‘Like a mum.’

  ‘Like a mum, yes. Peg arranged for me to do a few tarot readings in the back room of the pub she worked in – The Fox? Rough place then, probably still is, but to me it was like an extended version of Peg’s living room; everyone sat around having a laugh and knocking back Guinness and everyone knew I was Peg’s niece, too, and that was nice. I felt welcome. And I started to understand how strange people thought Mum was – you mentioned her name and it was all raised eyebrows and wry grins. It made me feel bad at first, like I was betraying her a bit, but at the same time…’

  ‘It was fun?’

  ‘Yes! It was good to hear that not everyone took her seriously, they just thought she was silly, you know? It felt cheeky… blasphemous almost. So I started questioning things a bit more, asking Peg things, and that’s when I started finding out about some of the weirdness.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Well, she hadn’t pulled me out of school for violence, for a start. I remember Peg saying something like,’ she lowered her voice, amping up her accent, to sound exactly like a younger, bullish Peg, ‘“Well that’s bollocks, right there. I don’t know why she took you out, but I told her it was a bad idea at the time. You were so shy, you wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Being in school would’ve helped you out, if you ask me. Fights? You? Nah. Ask Mona if you don’t believe me. I told her to keep an eye on you when she was in the last year, and she never saw you in any trouble at all.” Mum had just taken me out for her own reasons. Then I asked what Peg knew about my sisters, and she told me that there’d been no dead babies, no miscarriages—’

  ‘What? She told me all about the miscarriages, and she was so—’

  ‘Believable? Well, in fairness there was one. Child though, not a miscarriage. Lily was real, according to Peg, but the rest of them, no. That was just more… colour.’ She smiled bleakly, put on Peg’s voice again. ‘“Marie, what your mum says and what’s true are very different things. She’s tapped maybe. Got a want in her.”’

  ‘How old were you then?’

  ‘Sixteen. I Ieft home then, just left and didn’t tell Mum, not for a
year. Peg gave me enough money to go to London, and I worked in bars and read the cards, and managed to get on a few psychic fayres, and hen parties. I saved my money and did every course I could at the College of Psychic studies, mediumship and remote viewing. Peg kept on at me, telling me I was daft not to charge money: “If you were a mechanic you’d get paid, wouldn’t you? Or a dentist? You wouldn’t see them spending all that money on training and not wanting anything at the end of it. Get your coin, ’cause I’m telling you now that Sylvia’ll leave you fuck all when she goes. If she ever goes. That bitch’d survive a nuclear strike.”’ She smiled wryly at Kirsty. ‘And she wasn’t wrong, was she?’

  ‘But why did she let you go?’ Kirsty wondered. ‘Someone that controlling… it doesn’t fit.’

  ‘I’ve wondered that myself,’ Angela said. ‘I think she didn’t have a choice. She could only make me do things or believe things if I was with her – it was like really strong magnetism, but it didn’t work when I was with Peg, it was like Peg jammed her circuits. When I left I didn’t have a phone. When I got a phone I didn’t call Mum from it. I never came back, I never let her know my address, I changed my name, just like she had, but I wanted to go the opposite way – Night to Bright.’

  ‘Why Angela?’

  ‘Angel. Like Lily. Like Lisa. A homage, almost. When I moved to the States, I called her more often because I thought I was so absolutely safe – I mean, I was a different hemisphere away – I… relented. And she seemed to have mellowed too. She seemed… changed. I let my guard down. I started sending money. I figured I could afford it, and I was worried, you know, about her rattling around in that house, full of trash, with Mervyn getting older and sicker. She said she’d bought a flat for them both and I thought I was paying the mortgage. I thought that flat existed right up until I came back for the funeral, and I didn’t find out the truth until just before Vic’s party, where I first met you. I was livid, I felt conned and stupid and… small. And there she was, playing the lovely old lady who’s so proud of her daughter, it made me sick. That’s why I probably came across as so weird.’