by Jane Bidder
They had been a bit tight but Kayleigh gratefully wore them anyway. It had been the first time Mum had bought her anything for years! That’s why she still wore them.
Kayleigh thought all these things, and more, as she tossed and turned in the bunk bed above Hope on the night before the trial. She’d thought, briefly, of telling Angie about Mum begging her not to go to court. But then she might tell Marc who would spout off about doing the right thing because that’s what “God would want”. He’d probably tell the social worker too and the police might come and put her in handcuffs to force her to give evidence.
That had happened to one of Callum’s friends at his trial.
Even if she gave her evidence on a screen, away from people’s faces like the policeman had said she could, she’d still get Mum into trouble.
No, Kayleigh told herself as the early dawn light poured in through the window. The best thing to do was to fool everyone. To go to court and then run off before they made her say anything. She’d just have to find somewhere to hide, that was all.
There was a knock from the bunk bed below. “Stop moving around, will you?” hissed Hope crossly. “I can’t sleep.”
Even if it wasn’t for the trial, Kayleigh told herself, she’d have to run away. There was no way she was sticking this for much longer.
“Ready?” sang out Angie through the door.
She spoke as though they were going on some kind of picnic. They’d been on one of those the day before yesterday. Marc had made them trek through all these muddy fields and kept stopping to point out some flower or creepy green insect. Then Angie had got them to sit down, right next to a pile of cow poo, and brought out a plastic box of something called hew moss. It was made of chickpeas apparently and had made Kayleigh throw up.
Right now, Kayleigh would have given anything to go on a picnic instead of court.
“Are you dressed?” Angie sang out again.
“Yes,” lied Kayleigh, looking at the black dress Angie had put out for her the night before. There was no way she was wearing that even though Marc had said it was ‘advisable’ to wear something ‘conventional’. The dress was made of a coarse material and came down well below her knees. It would make her look like a laughing stock. That had been a phrase she’d used in an English essay: Mr Brown had given her an A but it didn’t seem so special now, after seeing him snog that girl.
“She’s not,” yelled out Hope. “She’s still in her pyjamas.”
They were rubbish too. All baggy with a hole at the front that had been clumsily sewn up.
Kayleigh glowered at her. “I’d rather wear my own jeans.”
“Sorry,” sang out Angie. Was she listening on the other side of the door? “They’re in the wash. I’d like you to wear the dress, Kayleigh. I made it myself.”
She could believe it. “That’s better,” exclaimed Angie clapping her hands together when she finally came through the door. “Isn’t it, Marc?”
Marc’s eyes followed her up and down. It gave her a weird shiver. “It will do.” He was holding the car keys. “Right. Let’s get going.”
So Angie wasn’t coming with them? Kayleigh felt a twinge of alarm. “We’re meeting your social worker at court,” he said, as she climbed into the front seat of the old jeep outside. His knee brushed hers, making Kayleigh edge away. If he so much as touched her, she’d open the door and jump out.
But maybe that knee brushing had been an accident, because he didn’t do it again during the hour or so journey into the city. Instead, he had the radio on and was singing along, using his own words above the real lyrics.
“We’ve got a friend in Jesus,
We’ve got a friend in Jeeesus. ”
At one point he slapped the dashboard with his left hand, keeping his right on the wheel. “Go on, Kayleigh. Don’t be shy. You sing along too.”
So she did, just to keep him quiet. He was as mad as his wife. Kayleigh’s hand gripped the handle on the inside of the car door, ready to open it if he did something. Not long now, she told herself. Not long now.
They parked alongside loads of smart cars next to a sign that said ‘Parking for Court Only’. “This way,” said Marc, putting on a tie as they walked along. Kayleigh tried to fall behind. There was a cafe on the corner there. She’d run in there and lock herself in the Ladies. He couldn’t get her there.
“Come on. Don’t dawdle.”
She’d lost her chance. Mouth dry with fear, Kayleigh had no option but to follow Marc in through the revolving doors, past a man in blue uniform who gave her a hard stare. I’m here as a witness, she wanted to say. But she could tell from his disdainful expression that he wouldn’t have believed her anyway.
“Wait there.” Marc motioned to a row of plastic chairs. “I’m just going to find your social worker. She said she’d be here by now.”
Trembling, Kayleigh did as she was told. As soon as he was out of sight, she told herself, she’d run. There was no way she could risk Mum being hurt. No way at all.
A tall, thin-faced youth came through the revolving doors and slid into the seat next to her. Kayleigh was aware of a slight smell of perspiration. “You was warned,” he muttered. Then before she had a chance to turn towards him, he thrust a piece of paper into her hands and legged it out through the doors.
What the …?
Kayleigh stared at the photograph on the paper. For a minute, she didn’t recognise it. Then she took in the new hair-do that Mum had had the other month. It was the rest of her face she didn’t get. The distorted nose, the eyes that were closed and the cut that ran from her left ear right down to her throat.
OH MY GOD.
They’d got her. They’d got Mum.
Leaping to her feet, she headed for the doors, almost colliding with someone coming in the opposite direction.
“Wait!” called out Marc’s voice behind her. “Wait. Grab her someone.”
Too late. She was off. Running faster than she’d ever run before. Bumping into people coming into the court and others walking past. There was a bus. Desperately, Kayleigh leaped on, fumbling in her pocket for the pound coin that Angie had given her for ‘refreshments’ at the court.
The doors closed just as Marc reached them. Kayleigh stood at the back, shaking. The bus was going the wrong way but it didn’t matter. She’d wait a couple of stops to make sure Marc was left behind and then she’d run home.
“Mum,” she moaned, not taking any notice of the woman beside her giving her strange looks. “Mum.”
Her chest was hurting so badly from running that Kayleigh could barely draw breath. But there wasn’t time to stop. She’d been jogging ever since the bus had stopped and she had to keep running. Mum. She had to find Mum. Hopefully Ron would have got her to hospital or maybe he’d just left her there, beaten into a bloody pulp. Perhaps he was scared the police would presume he was responsible so had scarpered.
Kayleigh felt cold with fear and anger. How could Frankie do such a thing? For the first time since she’d met him, Kayleigh was surprised to find that she hated him now. No one hurt her mum. No one. Not even Ron. Only now did she realised that she should have made a stand when she’d been at home.
At last! Kayleigh ran into the big square yard outside the block of flats and right into a group of kids in hoodies. “Watch where you’re fucking going,” said one.
“Yeah,” scowled another. “Show some bleeding respect.”
Kayleigh flew up the concrete staircase and along the landing of the third floor to the familiar blue door. Shit. It was open. They’d definitely been here, then. Maybe beaten up Ron, too …
Gingerly she pushed it open. Something was obstructing it. A suitcase. A big blue suitcase.
“Mum!” She took in her mother shoving a giant size packet of crisps into a bag. So she was all right. Her face was normal! Relief was swiftly followed by confusion. “You’re not hurt?”
If her mother was pleased to see her, she didn’t show it. “Hurt? ’Course I’m not bloody
hurt. What the fuck are you doing here?”
Kayleigh held out the picture on the paper which had got torn while she’d been running. “One of Frankie’s friends gave me this,” she said, breathlessly. “I thought they’d beaten you up.”
“Nah,” said Ron, coming in from the lounge door with more giant packets of crisps. “It’s just the way you look, isn’t it, love?” Then his eyes narrowed at the picture. “Fucking hell. They’ve photo shot you. Look. They must have taken your mug and then put stuff on it. Clever, innit?”
So they’d done it to scare her. Frankie hadn’t really hurt Mum, after all. The flood of relief was tempered with disappointment and hurt. Frankie had frightened her. Badly. And that wasn’t nice.
“I haven’t given evidence,” she began, before stopping. Wasn’t that a twenty-pound note poking out of one of those crisp packets? Then she realised.
“Frankie gave you money to make that phone call, didn’t he? He told you to act all scared so I wouldn’t get him into trouble.”
There was a brief silence. “ʼCourse he didn’t,” snapped Mum. But she looked at the suitcase as she spoke. Did Mum think she was daft? Frankie must have been desperate to have given her such a big bribe. Maybe his friends had helped …
“You’re going to do a runner with all the money he paid you to call me.”
Mum exchanged glances with Ron and then dipped into one of the crisp packets and held out two twenties. “Just take these, love, and get out, can you? Or we’ll miss our flight.”
Kayleigh fought back the tears. “You stopped me giving evidence so you could go off and leave me. Where are you going anyway? Spain?”
Mum didn’t have to say anything. She could tell she’d guessed the truth from her expression.
“You’re disgusting, both of you. Know that?”
She kicked the suitcase angrily. “You deserve each other, you two.” Then giving the suitcase another kick, she headed for the door.
“Don’t bother troubling your friend Marlene,” Ron called out. “She’s not there any more.”
Kayleigh felt a cold chill descending. “What do you mean?”
For a second, Mum actually looked sorry for her. “She o-deed. Last week.”
Over-dosed? She’d taken an overdose? Kayleigh clutched the side of the door for support. “She’s not …”
“Sorry, love.” Amazingly they looked like real tears in Mum’s eyes. “It was your Frankie, they say. Palmed her off with some cheap stuff.”
Marlene was dead? No. She couldn’t be. Funny, fearless Marlene; always egging her on to do things she didn’t really want to? Always there – until the last few weeks – to tell her it would be all right when Mum was a bitch or when Callum got taken off to prison.
Kayleigh wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come. Instead, she felt a searing hot rage inside. Frankie had killed her Marlene. She could see him for what he really was now. No good kidding herself any more. He didn’t love her any more, either.
But what should she do now? If she went back to the court to give evidence, Frankie’s lot might try to kill her. She might end up dead like poor Marlene.
Sinking down on a bench near the bus stop, Kayleigh tried to get her head straight. Why had she ever agreed to go out for the day with him? If only she could turn the clock back …
A bus arrived and without thinking, she got on it. “Where do you want to go, love?” asked the driver.
Did it matter? “To the end,” she said flatly. It sounded, she couldn’t help thinking, like a line from one of the novels Mr Brown had lent her.
Somehow, she just had enough money in her pocket for the ticket. Pressing her forehead against the window at the back, Kayleigh tried imagining that the last few weeks hadn’t happened. If she did it hard enough, she could just open her eyes and everything would be all right.
Ron wouldn’t have made a pass at her. She wouldn’t have met Frankie. And she wouldn’t have been taken into care.
“Everyone off,” said the bus driver. “Oy. You there at the back. Wake up.”
Kayleigh opened her eyes. Through the window, she saw a park. A pretty green park, just like the one where she and Frankie had made love. There was a hotel just up the hill. And over there, past a line of posh-looking houses, she could see the sea.
Bloody hell. This was it. The place where it had all begun …
Chapter Nineteen
Alice had only been in a court room once before. It was during a school trip when their Politics teacher had taken them to the Old Bailey in London. She remembered giggling with a friend as they’d ogled the enclosed space where a criminal would stand – although, as their teacher told them sharply, everyone was innocent until proved guilty. That hadn’t made much sense to a rather unworldly fifteen-year-old Alice. Surely the police must be pretty certain the person had done it, otherwise they wouldn’t have arrested him, would they? (Most criminals, when she thought about it – which wasn’t often – were male.)
The young Alice had been reprimanded, she recalled, for running her finger along the grainy wood of the witness box. “Don’t,” the teacher had snapped and for a few minutes she had tasted a guilty feeling in her mouth, reminding her of liver, which she’d always hated, and iodine; another disgusting smell from the hateful science labs. Was that how real criminals felt, she wondered?
Later, after lunch at a Wimpy – a real treat since her mother disapproved of fast food – she and a friend had mildly flirted with some boys from another visiting school, miles from her own. One, with dark floppy hair, had been on the verge of asking for her number (so exciting!) when their teacher had rounded them all up for a visit to the Public Gallery “where you are all going to see a real trial”.
Alice would rather have stayed with the floppy-haired schoolboy who was giving her a regretful wave. It wasn’t fair! Everyone else was beginning to get boyfriends, although opportunities were mainly limited to the boys’ school since Alice’s parents didn’t approve of the local disco. Why were they so strict?
Then, just as she and the rest of her class had begun to wriggle with boredom on their seats, a policeman had led in a small, bowed, grey-haired man who was surely old enough to be a grandfather. She’d watched in a mixture of horror and inexplicable sympathy as he slumped in the dock, his head on the side, eyes closed, as a litany of charges was read against him. They included something called ‘procurement’ which caused a ripple of murmurs throughout the court.
What does it mean, Alice had wanted to ask, but felt too foolish to do so. Later when she’d got home, she’d looked up the word in the one of the red and gold Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes which lined her parents’ lounge wall. No! That sweet old man had made women work as prostitutes? Thank heavens she hadn’t said anything; the others would have thought she was stupidly naïve.
All that had been before Uncle Phil, in the days when the word ‘boys’ and ‘sex’ had sent an illicit excited thrill through her.
And now, here she was, all over again. Not in the dock (where one of her classmates had clambered in after the case had ended and been sent back to the coach for punishment instead of continuing on to the theatre). Or in the gallery where she had stared down with a thrilled mixture of horror and fascination as the old man had been sentenced to ten years. But in the witness stand, her hand on the Bible, promising to swear the truth.
Now, as Alice reached the end of her oath, she could have sworn something else too. The courtroom door was still open. Wasn’t that the girl from the park, rushing past in the outside corridor? Or was that her mind playing tricks?
Certainly, she hadn’t been able to think straight since that thunderbolt phone call from Sheila Harris who might, Brian had said grimly, save Garth’s bacon. Lady Harris – titled! – was the mother of someone quite important in the British Embassy. “Her word counts for a good deal,” Brian had told them. “We might just be in with a chance.”
Lady Harris’s words against the South American authorities … Alice�
�s own word against the tall, thin, skinny youth with jet-black hair and green eyes in the dock opposite, who appeared to be chewing something and shooting her cold steely looks. His smart suit – a cheap-looking one with a maroon sheen about it – seemed at odds with that stare. He was, Alice suspected, more used to jeans. Maybe the slashed-knee variety that Garth favoured.
Garth … What would he wearing now? Would the authorities have taken his clothes away? Would they be feeding him properly? Dear God, please don’t let them be beating him …
“Not guilty,” growled the youth in the cheap maroon suit opposite her. His Irish accent and challenging stare, directed straight at her, forced Alice to concentrate on what was happening right now instead of thinking about her son.
Was this really, she wondered, the anonymous person who had posted threats through her door with their garish cut-out alphabet letters? Daniel had told her to take them down to the station and make a bigger fuss but she hadn’t. What was the point? It might make it worse. Besides, it was easier this way to pretend they hadn’t been put through the door at all. To imagine that Garth was still free …
The prosecutor was talking to her now. Concentrate, she told herself again, fiercely. This was not the time to think of Garth, who might be slumped on the floor of a prison cell, thinking that she’d abandoned him (Brian said that communication was very difficult and that the paperwork required for a visit could take months).
Listen to what the lawyer was saying. It was her duty. She had to do right by Kayleigh, the girl in the park and all the other girls in the park; just as Lady Harris was going to do the right thing by Garth. An eye for an eye. One witness statement for another.
“Can you describe exactly what you saw, please, Mrs Honeybun?”
His voice was kind. Reassuring. That was of course, because he was on her side. The prosecutor would start first, Paul Black had explained. He would outline the case against Frankie Miller of the maroon suit in the dock and then call witnesses to ‘substantiate’ the case.
