Little Sister

by Isabel Ashdown

  “Thought you were the good one,” he said, and he laughed, betraying his discomfort, and Jess looked away and took a swig from her bottle, and the moment passed. “Right, talking of drinking . . . ,” Simon said with a clap of his hands, and he broke into a jog, catching up with Lizard as he disappeared inside the house.

  Emily stared after him. One minute he had been there, all over her, happy to see her—the next, he was gone.

  “Do you want this?” Jess asked her, casually easing herself away from the two boys and offering Emily her drink.

  Emily ran her eyes over her sister, suspicion clawing at her insides, and really, she wanted to lash out at her, to blame her for Simon’s indifference. Why did she feel as though it was all Jess’s fault that this evening wasn’t working out the way she had imagined it would? Their eyes connected; Emily’s were steely, Jess’s confused.

  “Is everything OK?” Jess asked.

  Emily nodded, allowing herself to appear perplexed at such a pointless question. “Why wouldn’t I be? Look, there’s Jane—and Sammie—let’s see if they’re up for a dance.” She grabbed Jess’s drink and finished it in one long swallow, calling out to her friends and throwing her head back when they came rushing over, laughing as if she was having the best of times. She glanced back at sporty Alex, noted how his angular jaw and scruffy, sun-bleached hair were now painted amber in the low summer light, and gave him one of her biggest, shiniest smiles.

  If Simon could do his own thing, so could she.

  * * *

  Even through her sedated slumber, Emily has been aware of the endlessly ringing phone, of the hammering on the front door, of the car door slamming and the raised voices of the waiting press just beyond the gravel of their front drive. At some point, Jess looked in on her and told Emily that the police were here again, but she couldn’t lift her head, couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge that she’d heard what her sister was saying, though she knew from her tone that it was important.

  “DCI Jacobs is here,” she’d said, knocking softly on the door after she’d opened it. “There’s been a development, Ems. Don’t you think you should get up?”

  Emily had groaned a little and motioned “no” with the slightest movement of her head on the pillow.

  “I think you should,” Jess had pressed on. “I”ll leave you to get yourself sorted, and there’ll be a cup of tea waiting for you when you get downstairs.”

  They are down there now, she knows, but she can’t face them. The endless talking, the same solemn questions put to her in a vaguely different format, the eternal expression of hope on James’s face. At the next bang on the front door, she eases herself out of her bed, still fully clothed, and shuffles to the window to peer through a crack in the curtains, out into the early evening darkness of the front drive. It’s after five o’clock, and yet there are dozens of the vultures out there, more than ever before, cawing and preening for a follow-up to their salacious story. Jesus, what a reflection on modern society, that the press have more interest in an abduction story once it turns out that there are mucky goings-on between members of the heartbroken family. She wants to spit at them all.

  Directly below her window, James has opened the front door. She’s still trying to remain concealed, but if she presses close to the window jamb, she can just make out the top of the journalist’s head and clearly hears their brief conversation.

  “Mr. King! Joe Leighton of the Mirror—no, please don’t close the door—it’s about Avril, your first wife.”

  This is enough to get James’s attention; he would have been expecting them to ask about his relationship with Jess. Emily wonders if they have news. Have they found her?

  “What about her?” James replies, curtly.

  “We understand that she’s spent several years in mental institutions? Is that true? Do the police still think that Avril has Daisy?”

  James must be backing off, because the journalist leans in, as if to prevent the door from closing, shouting, “Mr. King! Do you think that your ex-wife could be dangerous? Are you concerned?”

  Now James steps out into full view, his broad posture challenging, and the journalist takes a defensive move backwards. The others all hang around at the edge of the drive, knowing better than to harangue us with the police here.

  “Am I concerned? Of course I’m bloody concerned! Why would you even ask a question as pointless as that? Avril’s unstable, for God’s sake—who wouldn’t be concerned?” James returns to the house, slamming the door behind him, and for a few seconds, the journalist remains on the spot, staring after him, before his face shifts into a smirk and he returns to the pack.

  In a sudden fit of rage, Emily throws back the curtain and opens the window, leaning out so violently that for a moment she thinks she might fall. “Fuck off!” she yells, and in a second their cameras are all trained on her, sending brutal missiles of flashlight out into the dark night, lighting up her craziness for all the world to see. She retreats as suddenly as she had appeared, stumbling out into the hallway to find James, to tell him what had happened, to make him sort it out and get these bastards off their front drive. “James!” she shouts urgently as she rushes down the stairs, but when she gets there, she finds they have a houseful.

  It’s DCI Jacobs who stands to greet her, not James, and she holds out her palm to offer Emily a seat at her own table. Emily’s confusion is crippling; she looks from Jess to James, ignoring the greetings of Piper and Cherry and the other officer who sits at the table, and she’s certain that they have come to arrest her. Do they know what she’s done?

  “Mrs. King,” the inspector says, stopping Emily’s thoughts with the unexpected gentleness in her tone. “Emily. Avril has been in contact. James is going to meet her tomorrow—and there’s a good chance she’ll have Daisy with her.”

  16

  Avril

  How strange it was to hear his voice today. His tone was so warm and calm that I knew he wasn’t angry at me for taking Chloe like I did. I knew he would be happy to hear from me. His letter had said as much, hadn’t it? He trusts me; he knows I’ll take good care of her.

  It’s raining now, but I don’t mind a bit as I sit at the window, watching the swirling tide beyond the Old Battery. Just out of view, the waves will be charging up around the Needles, casting plumes of white foam in high arcs, back-flipping gracefully into the waters they came from. Some people live for the summer; not me. I love the winter months in England, from the crisp, frosted mornings of November to the drizzle-gray evenings of February. Winter challenges your senses in a way summer can’t. Summer makes you feel good so effortlessly: warm and light. But winter dares you to be happy despite the cold and damp, and I like the physicality of that hardship, the way it forces you to experience the body over the mind.

  Chloe is sleeping in her little cot drawer behind me; tomorrow she will see her daddy for the first time in, oh, how long? When did I last see him? So long ago, but my timelines are always getting muddled, like long strands of seaweed woven together by the turning currents, so that by the time I try to untangle them, they appear as one great knotted rope of green. I remember St. Justin’s, and I know that was the first place I stayed in, as I remember James visiting me there. He never brought Chloe, but one time he came with his mother, and she tried to be nice to me—which I knew was a lie—and I screamed at her to get out, and he agreed never to bring her again. I don’t know how long I stayed at St. Justin’s, but I do know that by the time I was moved to Buddleia Hill, my hair was no longer blond, but instead the mousy brown color nature gave me. When they showed me to my room, I found it was much nicer than the one I had at St. Justin’s, where they didn’t let me have many things in case I harmed myself (at least, that’s what Annie from Trinidad told me). But here I had coat hangers, a plastic toothbrush mug, a manicure set, and even a bathroom mirror screwed to the wall above the sink. I wondered how long it had been since I’d really looked at my own reflection. Of course, there were mirrors at St. Ju
stin’s, but not one in the privacy of my own room, one I could stand in front of for long minutes or hours while I tried to work out what had happened to me, where everyone had gone.

  James never visited me at Buddleia Hill, and for the first year or so, neither did anyone else. But then they matched me with a visiting volunteer called Lily, and she came once a week, without fail, even when I was just a day patient on the various occasions I tried independent living. The first occasion we met didn’t go too well, because she reminded me so powerfully of James’s mother that I quite lost my temper, in a way that the staff at Buddleia Hill had never seen before. I remember that clearly, unlike so many of my other memories. As Lily approached me in the common room and smiled, she extended her hand to shake mine, and her face was so much the double of James’s mother that I stood up in fright, knocking my chair backward as my heart hammered against my rib cage. “No, no, no,” she said gently, despite my loud cries for help, and along with Ginny, my care worker, they talked me down and made me understand that Lily was someone else altogether. I miss Lily now, with her bright, intelligent eyes and her gentle sense of humor. She was always telling me about these meetings she went to—my “old biddy” meetings, she called them—where they’d learn new skills, or talk about a book they’d all read, or take turns baking a cake. Sometimes she’d bring me a slice, and always she’d bring me a new story to laugh about, like the time they went wall climbing at the local sports center and Dennis, her eighty-two-year-old would-be suitor, got stuck on the top rung. “He was mortified,” she giggled into her hand. “He kept apologizing to me afterward, as if he’d let me down. Poor old duffer.”

  Of course, Buddleia Hill closed down five years after my first stay there, and they set me up in my own home, ten miles away, because I was well enough and they’d got my medication levels just right, apparently. On her last visit to Buddleia Hill, Lily handed me her telephone number jotted on a slip of paper, and asked me to keep in touch, to let her know how I was doing. I committed that number to memory there and then, but once I’d left Buddleia Hill, I never spoke to Lily again. I think of her now, and I wish I could see her. I wish she were here with me now, watching the rain trickle down the windowpane, telling me funny stories, and sharing her cake.

  A solitary gull soars across my horizon, a white flash against the turbulent gray seascape. Tomorrow I will see James again. We will take a walk around the Botanic Garden with Chloe or head down the steps to Steephill Cove, and if the weather is fair, we’ll have a cream tea in the café there. I hope with all my heart that it will be just like it should have been before all our troubles. If it isn’t, I don’t know what I might do.

  17

  Jess

  The meeting has been arranged for 2:00 p.m., so DCI Jacobs’s team picks us up just before 12:00 to drive us to the Botanic Garden at Ventnor, where James will meet Avril at the tunnel tour. Chloe is still staying at Max’s, so it’s just the three of us—James, Emily, and me—dashing across the drive to jump into the back of DC Piper’s car. When we arrive, DCI Jacobs is there waiting for us, and she steps out of her car and into the passenger seat of ours, looking back between the seats to give us our instructions. It seems Emily is too recognizable, so she must stay out of sight, preferably in the car, while I am to don a hooded raincoat and join the tunnel tour at a distance from James, along with two other plainclothes officers.

  “It’s low season,” DCI Jacobs explains. “We need to add to the tour, or else she might get cold feet. As she’s asked to meet James as part of a group tour, we can only assume she’s looking for the anonymity of a crowded place. We’ve got plainclothes officers stationed at all the entrances to the car park—they’ll be on the lookout for her Renault—and there are several others positioned within the gardens, ready to apprehend her if she tries to leave via an unexpected route.”

  Emily can barely look at me. Even now, even in adulthood, I’m tortured by not knowing what goes on behind that frosty veneer of hers. Is it fear? Or anger? Or jealousy, that I’m the one assisting the police operation? How could she possibly feel jealous of this? God knows, I’d rather be sitting in the warm car with her than going through the anxiety of a dark tunnel tour with James’s resurrected first wife.

  The tour meeting point is next to the pond near the gated tunnel entrance, and I’m instructed to act naturally, keep my head down, attach myself to the two other officers, and chat as if we’re a group of friends. There will be others too—probably the group Avril mentioned overhearing yesterday—so it should be easy enough to mix in. And James, he must make sure he’s toward the back of the tour party, so that the other officers, posing as ticket takers and grounds staff, can maintain a good view of him as Avril approaches. When she arrives with Daisy—God, please let it be with Daisy—he is to delay her, embrace her if it feels appropriate, take the child from her, and wait for the police to step in. Simple.

  Once DCI Jacobs is happy we’re all clear on our roles, we take our positions, leaving Emily alone with DC Cherry for company. “Can I get you a drink from the café?” I hear him asking her as we leave them, his stock line in conversation when left alone with her.

  We pass through the visitor entrance and make our way through the palm gardens and succulents, past Japanese terraces and greenhouses, ascending fern-lined stairwells and sandy banks, and I feel as though I’ve entered a dream world, a warm, green, lush unreality on this otherwise rainy January afternoon. Emerging into the real light of day, we arrive at the pond, alongside several other visitors, including an elderly couple with a tartan-coated dog and a young family of four. The youngest child is lively, excited, running in and out of the puddles as her tired-looking parents look on, only their mouths smiling. We look completely ordinary, blending in with the other visitors, dressed in raincoats or sheltering under umbrellas against the persistent icy drizzle. We wait for a few minutes, and I check my watch, but we’re still five minutes early, and I’m wondering how James is feeling, standing close by but unable to look in my direction for support. And then the tour guide arrives with the flaghlights, and we’re entering the tunnel, vaguely listening to health and safety information about uneven floor surfaces and overhead hazards—and there’s no sign of Avril.

  The smell of damp stone is overwhelming, and despite the flashlights, the darkness closes in around us, shrinking the space, causing us to huddle and bump against each other uncertainly. At a central point, the tour guide asks us all to stop as she tells us a little about the tunnel’s original history as an access route for the Victorian patients of the former Royal National Hospital to the coast below, otherwise only accessible by the famously steep steps leading down to Steephill Cove. She dares us all to turn our flashlights off at the count of three, and we’re plunged into darkness. What if she’s in here with us? The thought is upon me before I have time to process it, and I gasp loudly, spooking the others around me, prompting a flurry of flashlights flickering back to life.

  Behind us, back the way we came, a lone shape appears through the tunnel, alerting us with the sound of running footsteps on damp ground, hood up, head down, jogging toward us in the flickering flashlight beam. It’s her, I think, and I freeze, breath caught, unable to turn away, incapable of acting like just one of the group. As her figure grows closer, her shadow stretching and shrinking along the aged brickwork, I feel the collective tension of the others, of those of us in the know, and I daren’t look away from her, lest she vanish altogether, never to be seen again.

  “Creepy, huh?” the guide says of the previous seconds of total darkness, and the hooded woman comes to a stop at the back of the group. And it’s not her. It’s a young woman, maybe nineteen or twenty—it’s not Avril. Through the darkness I hear the low, long whisper of James’s breath, the pain of his disappointment.

  Now we’re moving again, heading toward the pinprick of light at the other end of the tunnel that holds the promise of the sea. Perhaps she’s there already; perhaps she took an alternative route via the
beach, so as to outfox the police and be already in place to meet James on the other side. My breath catches in my throat. But when we come out on the other side, there’s just a steep drop to the beach below, and no Avril. I glance casually in James’s direction and see him standing at the edge of the grass bank, his face set in grave concentration, as he studies the beach below, searching for Avril. Searching for his daughter.

  “OK, everyone ready to head back?” asks the tour guide, and we’re in the tunnel again, returning to the other side, and this time James and I walk side by side, and in the darkness I feel the hopelessness radiating from him like heat.

  At the center of the tunnel, the guide stops us again. “One more time for lights out? One, two, three—lights out!”

  Again, we’re plunged into darkness, and I don’t know why I do it, but I do—I move my hand toward James, and our fingers slot together like jigsaw pieces, and it feels like the most natural thing in the world. The flashlights light up again, and our hands separate as we continue through the tunnel toward the circle of daylight beyond.

  Outside, DCI Jacobs is standing at a distance, and she indicates for us to return to the car park, an expression of resignation on her face.

  “I don’t think she’s coming,” she says, and she holds up today’s newspaper.

  DAISY’S DAD FEARS “UNSTABLE” EX-WIFE

  James brings his hand to his mouth, as all the color drains from him. “She’ll never trust me now,” he says, and then he weeps.

  * * *

  There are certain things I do remember about the party, but I don’t go there too often, taking pains to avoid that particular hole in time for fear that I’ll fall further into the memory, further down into the horror of what actually happened that night. But since meeting Sammie again when I went home for Mum’s funeral, I can’t seem to help it, and my mind trespasses there when I’m least expecting it, when I’m drifting into sleep or walking alone, as though there’s a puzzle there that wants solving, one which can only be unraveled by returning to the scene of the crime. On the way home from the Botanic Garden, I doze in the back of the detective’s car, with Emily sitting rigidly beside me in the middle and James quietly brooding on her other side. I don’t mean to think about it, but as my eyes grow heavy and the fields and hedges of the island rush past by my window, I find myself there again, back in that nightmare, back in that night.