All the Hidden Truths_Three Rivers

by Claire Askew

  The line was quiet. You’re being cruel, Birch thought. You’re not thinking straight.

  ‘I know,’ Amy said. ‘You’re saying things I’ve already said to myself. You’re right. But I do think we need to get her some more support. I know she’s not a victim, but – well, she kind of is, you know?’

  ‘I do know,’ Birch said. ‘This sort of crime . . . a crime with no bad guy? Victims are all there is.’

  Birch looked up then. The house around her was dark – she hadn’t switched the lights on, and without the glow of the TV, the room was lit dim and ghostly by the streetlight on the promenade outside. On the wall opposite the shrouded sofa, the old mantelpiece was visible above the hearth, with its jumbled stack of boxes. The only thing sitting on it was a photo of Birch’s mother, its silver-plated frame caught in what little light there was. The photo itself was invisible, a dark square – but Birch could see that photo’s wan face in detail if she closed her eyes.

  ‘Victims are all there is,’ she said again, more quietly this time.

  ‘You’re tired,’ Amy said. ‘I’m sorry I bothered you at home. I’ll let you get some sleep. I need to get out of here myself.’

  ‘You do,’ Birch said, trying to inject a smile into her voice. ‘I’ll be in early tomorrow, and we’ll talk more. We’ll make a plan for Moira, and then you can go and see her and get her feedback. How does that sound?’

  ‘Good,’ Amy said, after a moment’s pause. ‘That sounds good. Thanks, Helen.’

  Birch nodded, her eyes closed. Her mother’s pale face still hung, spectreish, behind her eyelids.

  ‘Oh,’ Amy said. ‘Sorry – before I go, I should tell you. I’ve been getting a load of missed calls from that Grant Lockley guy.’

  Him again. Birch heaved out a sigh.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Will we never be free?’

  ‘I’ve been ignoring him,’ Amy said, ‘but – he was calling about ten times a day. I’d just got used to hanging up, you know? And then all of a sudden, the calls stopped.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Two days ago,’ Amy said. ‘Absolutely nothing for two days.’

  ‘Well, lucky you.’

  ‘No.’ Amy’s voice was once again creased with worry. ‘I don’t believe it’s luck. I don’t think a guy like that just gives up because you ignore him.’

  Birch glanced up again at her mother’s picture.

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t.’

  ‘So something’s going on, then,’ Amy said. ‘He’d only stop if he’d got whatever it was he wanted, right? I’m worried it means he’s got something on Moira, and he’s getting ready to publish it.’

  Birch hesitated.

  ‘Or,’ she said eventually, ‘it means he’s moved on to a new target.’ She thought of Ishbel Hodgekiss, the conversation she must be having with Rehan right now.

  ‘Like who?’

  Birch closed her eyes again. Her tiredness felt like deep, warm water, and she was beginning to give in to its undertow.

  ‘You’ll find out tomorrow,’ she said.

  Amy made a little sound on the other end, but then obviously decided not to push.

  ‘It’s just . . . I think you were right,’ Amy said. ‘What you were saying a couple of weeks ago, when we were interviewing her. There is something Moira’s not telling us. I’m trying to get to the bottom of it, but . . . what if Lockley got there before me?’

  Amy was right. There was something about Moira Summers’ testimony that just wasn’t quite right, it had been bothering her too: spattering in the background like a fly against glass. Moira had seemed genuine enough: her grief and shock were real. Birch was sure she hadn’t known her son was going to die. She probably hadn’t known he was going to go on a murder spree, either – surely, surely. But what she might know was why. Why her son might hate women enough to remove thirteen of them from this world. What spark might have lit the touchpaper of his anger and allowed it to detonate that day in the Three Rivers refectory. If Moira Summers did know, she seemed intent on silence.

  ‘If he has,’ Birch said, too tired to verbalise those thoughts to Amy, ‘there’d probably be nothing we could do about it.’

  There was a long silence on the line. Birch heard Amy yawn, though she was obviously trying to do it quietly.

  ‘You think he ever, like . . . goes home?’

  Birch blinked – her eyelids had begun to flutter.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That Lockley guy,’ Amy said. ‘He left me a voicemail at midnight the other night. I mean, don’t these people have lives?’

  Birch thought for a moment. She’d asked that question herself, before, but only ever in the abstract, as a sort of sideways insult. She supposed she’d always thought about Lockley and his ilk – those particularly persistent tabloid columnists who saw provocation as part of their ‘personal brand’ – as not quite human, not really fully part of society. She realised she’d never thought about whether Lockley went home at night to a wife and kids, or a boyfriend, for that matter, or an adorable collection of cats. Although her tired brain wouldn’t allow her to imagine it, she guessed he did go home to something. Everyone had something they cared about, didn’t they? Even people like him. But having to consider Lockley as a fully rounded person irritated her – she couldn’t dwell on it.

  ‘Hey,’ she said, forcing brightness into her voice. ‘We ought to go and grab a beer sometime. After work. After things quieten down a bit, obviously. Thanks to Ryan Summers, I’ve rather missed out on the whole get-to-know-your-new-colleagues thing.’

  Amy laughed a small laugh – as much to rally herself as anything, Birch could tell.

  ‘That sounds great,’ she said, then added, ‘guv.’

  Again, Birch felt an upsurge of good, sisterly feeling towards this woman.

  ‘Listen, you call me any time,’ she said. ‘Okay? With a case like this, there’s no such thing as home time. Not for me, anyway. You need me? You phone. Got it?’

  ‘Thanks, Helen.’

  Amy hung up. Against her own better judgement, Birch kicked the takeaway boxes and half-unpacked clutter off the sofa, swung her feet up onto the dust-sheets, and lay down.

  28 May, 8.45 a.m.

  Ishbel had been staring at Abigail’s prom dress for about fifteen minutes. It was hanging on the front of the wardrobe in Abigail’s bedroom, its watermark-patterned taffeta distorted through its clear plastic dry-cleaning bag. She was trying to conjure the memory of going to buy it – she and Abigail spending a giggly afternoon in the dress shop’s plush fitting room, coming home with the dress in one of the shop’s shiny, rope-handed totes. Did they go out for dinner afterwards, maybe? Did they buy the shoes that day, too, or some other time? Ishbel felt like she was digging through sticky tar, trying desperately to dredge up the memory. But all she could remember was that night, two weeks ago, when she and Abigail had argued in the car. Her daughter’s last words to her: ‘Mother, you’re on fucking crack.’

  At the time, Ishbel had balked at the way she’d been spoken to. But the retort was also a drugs reference. Ishbel closed her eyes and tried – as she had several times since Grant Lockley’s revelations – to imagine her daughter taking drugs. Carrying drugs; taking money for them in risky, unwholesome exchanges. She tried to imagine Abigail high: messy and throwing up. The images refused to be summoned. She couldn’t believe it – wouldn’t believe it. The realisation of Aidan’s infidelity had hit her like a train she’d already heard coming: there was shock, and pain, but there was no surprise. I should have known, she thought. But Abigail? No. It simply couldn’t be true.

  Ishbel had smoothed out some space on the still-unmade bed, and placed a holdall there. Then, as calmly as she could, she’d packed as many of her daughter’s things as the bag would fit. She’d found the coral sweater in the wardrobe, drooping lopsided on its hanger. Without any real idea why, Ishbel had unhooked it, folded it into a fat square, and placed it into the holdall. The
n she’d rifled through the rest of the wardrobe. She found Abigail’s old school tie – navy with diagonal white stripes – and, having stood for a moment with it coiled loosely around her hand, Ishbel had folded that too, and placed it on top of the sweater.

  Hanging on the back of the wardrobe door was Abigail’s satin dressing gown. It was powder blue with a pattern of tiny pink and red flowers. When Abigail had bought it, Ishbel had frowned at how adult it was – how like lingerie it seemed. But now she balled up the slippery fabric and added that, too, to the bag.

  It became systematic. Ishbel had looked through every drawer. She’d found Abigail’s jewellery box and winkled a few things out, and dropped them into her own cardigan pocket. She’d pulled out the under-bed boxes, held their sheets and towels up to her face – though of course they were clean, and smelled only of lavender fabric softener. Shaking out one towel, Ishbel had heard a thud, and looked down to find a thick book lying at her feet. When she picked it up it felt surprisingly weighty. The cover was bouncy padded leather in baby pink, and the covers were clasped tightly together by a brass catch, a tiny padlock dangling from it. Ishbel hadn’t even hesitated before pressing on the little unlocking mechanism, but no luck. Locked. She’d packed it into the holdall anyway.

  The prom dress wouldn’t fit in the bag – not with everything else already packed – she knew that. But it felt suddenly important. She’d found it crushed into the back of the wardrobe, and had cried as she peeled it out into the open air, the dry-cleaning bag making slippery creaks. She was still crying now.

  Her first realisation upon stepping into Abigail’s room had been that she, Ishbel, hadn’t set foot in there in weeks. It was a mess of spilled laundry and unmade bedclothes. Her second realisation was that there must be some mistake – her daughter could not possibly be dead, not with this room the same as it always was. The scent of spiced cake hung in the air. Abigail loved scented candles, and bought a particular brand that came in thick glass jars. But underneath was the smell of Abigail herself: the hair and skin and human girl of her. Ishbel’s third realisation was that yes, it was true, her daughter was dead. The room was cold and quiet and no one was going to live here ever again.

  Crying was what Ishbel did now – her default setting. She was getting used to seeing everything through a thick veil of tears: the world blurred and dragging. The only moment of not-crying she’d had in two weeks had come the previous night, when Rehan and Aidan had cornered her in the kitchen, and Aidan wordlessly handed her a crumpled print-out of the journalist’s article.

  ‘This is disgusting,’ she’d said, tears pulling their tracks over her face’s dusty skin. ‘How does he sleep at night, this man? How does someone even come up with these lies?’

  She’d watched Rehan and Aidan exchange looks. For a while, the kitchen echoed with her quiet sobs.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Aidan said at last, ‘he isn’t lying. I know this is the worst time for you to find out about this, Bel, and I never would have said anything . . .’

  Ishbel had looked back down at the print-out, now dappled with the tiny, damp circles of her tears, her fingerprints.

  ‘Which part,’ she said, ‘is true, Aidan?’

  ‘The affair.’ Rehan had said it, as it seemed Aidan could not.

  ‘That’s not how I’d categorise it—’ Aidan said, but Ishbel had cut him off.

  ‘With who?’

  That was when the tears had stopped – then, in that long yawn of silence while she waited for him to speak.

  ‘Netta,’ he said, quietly.

  Ishbel had cast around for the name, realised he meant Annetta, one of the dental nurses at his practice.

  ‘Netta,’ she repeated. ‘But she’s – what, twenty-five?’

  Aidan’s face was pale. Ishbel’s vision had suddenly become clear and sharp enough to see the fine stubble that misted his jaw: more grey in it than she remembered.

  ‘Twenty-eight,’ he said.

  There had been an empty wine bottle on the counter, Ishbel remembered that. She remembered wondering, in that moment, how it had got there – who had drunk the wine? She made a mental note to put it into the recycling box in the hall. Then she had reached for it, and then—

  There was a noise in the garden below that shook her back to the present. Rehan was outside, wrangling the crowd of paparazzi away from the street, so the funeral cars could pull up. In front of Ishbel, the prom dress swam back into focus. I could wear it, Ishbel thought. To the cremation. She glanced down at the black pencil skirt and jacket she was already wearing, then back up at the deep turquoise fabric of the dress. She reached out for the zip of the dry-cleaning bag, and her fingertips registered the strange dry-wet feeling of the plastic. She slipped the dress off its chunky hanger and rustled it out of the bag’s opening, leaving the bag hanging on the wardrobe like some emptied chrysalis, mildly obscene-looking. She pinned the dress against her own body with one forearm. She’d hoped it would smell like Abigail, but it didn’t – it smelled like the plastic of the bag, like the cedar balls dropped in the bottom to keep away moths. With her free hand she scrabbled at the side of the bodice for the zip.

  ‘Bel?’

  Aidan was standing in the doorway. Ishbel spun to face him, and as she did, the wide taffeta skirt swung out. Give us a twirl, she remembered him saying, Abigail standing in front of him, breathless, waiting for the prom limousine to arrive.

  ‘Bel, what are you doing?’ he said.

  ‘I was thinking about wearing this.’ She had no energy in her to make up a lie. ‘To the cremation.’

  She watched Aidan look her up and down. There was a bruise on his left cheekbone, purpling like a stormcloud under his eye. A cut oozing in the bruise’s centre. She remembered last night – remembered putting it there – and her face flushed.

  ‘Bel,’ he said, quietly, ‘you have to keep it together, okay? Just for today. Just for this morning.’

  He put out one hand, palm down, as though she were a skittish dog he wanted to pet.

  ‘Just keep it together for a few hours, and then we can talk.’

  He began to advance across the bedroom towards her, and her hand reached out for the holdall, as though it were some protective talisman. The prom dress fell to the floor in one ragged movement, its fabric shushing down around Ishbel’s feet.

  ‘I won’t talk,’ she said. She swung the holdall, heavy now, around in front of her, dangling it in the air between them. ‘Not to you.’

  Aidan reached down and hooked the prom dress up in one hand. He rolled it into a fat, crumpled bandage around one arm – his idea of how to fold a thing. A noise leaked out of Ishbel like she’d been squeezed.

  ‘Come on, Bel,’ he said. ‘We can move past this.’

  ‘Hang that up,’ she instructed. ‘In its bag, like it’s supposed to be.’

  She gestured at the empty bag, still hanging like a spectre on the wardrobe’s front.

  ‘And no,’ she added, after a moment. ‘We can’t.’

  Aidan looked back up at her, the dress half wrestled into its plastic.

  ‘Move past it. We can’t. I can’t.’ Ishbel brandished the holdall. ‘I’m going to the cremation, and then I’m moving out. I’m taking the car – I’m not getting in one of those hearse cars, not with you. I don’t want to breathe the same air as you ever again.’

  Her pulse stuttered in her ears, loud and irregular. The thought this is right came to her: this is what you should be doing. You should have split up long ago – why didn’t you? Was it her daughter’s voice she was hearing? No, surely not. Abigail was the very reason she and Aidan had lasted as long as they had – wasn’t she? And if she wasn’t, then why had they kept this charade going for so long? Hadn’t she, Ishbel, known there was something going on with Aidan lately – something sinister that had invaded their marriage, a pin-thin beam of light she didn’t want to look directly at? She heard Abigail’s words again: Mother, you’re on fucking crack – meaning, you’re crazy, you�
��re delusional. Perhaps I have been those things, Ishbel thought. But then her scattergun anger coughed into life again. How could Aidan have done this? How could those have been the last words Abigail had spoken to her own mother? It was as if those words had started a chain reaction: from that moment, everything in Ishbel’s world had begun to fall apart. She half expected, as she walked out of the room – leaving Aidan standing open-mouthed with his hands full of taffeta – that the floor beneath her feet would split, and she’d be pulled down through the falling wreckage of that house, down through the air, and into the earth.

  The crematorium was a low, flat slab of a building, made from breezeblocks, and surrounded by a breezeblock wall that could be seen between the surrounding trees in any direction. The wall was high, and topped with barbed wire in places. As she drove in, Ishbel thought about prison, about the sort of place Ryan Summers might have been put if he hadn’t killed himself, the sort of punishment he might have been given. It shocked her, his sudden presence in her thoughts – she realised she hadn’t really thought of him all that much since Abigail died. What had she been thinking of, all this time? She found she didn’t really know. She’d mainly been crying, and recalling old memories of Abigail, playing them again and again, like a worn-out old VHS tape.

  ‘You’ve been so busy crying and rending your garments,’ Aidan had said to her – shouted at her – the night before, ‘that you haven’t done anything useful in two whole weeks! What about me? What about supporting me? What about supporting each other? You should be glad I had someone to turn to.’

  You should be glad I’ve been keeping a mistress. That was when she’d flown at him, fists first. Rehan had peeled her away.

  She stood in the crematorium car park for a while. Because she’d come in her own car, she was there first, not obliged to travel at the plodding speed of the funeral cars. At one end of the car park there was a huge skip, filled to the top with flowers. White lilies with petals browned, spilling their dark red pollen into the air; frilly roses whose blooms were too far out now, showing their frayed yellow stamens. With a jolt, Ishbel realised that only days ago, families had agonised over these flowers. She imagined the careful conversations in florists’ shops: He always loved pink roses. We must have lilies; it’s tradition. Now each floral fetish was rotting in a rusted blue skip. Ishbel had chosen no flowers – this service was the cremation only, brought on by the sudden release of Abigail’s remains. There’d be a nice memorial service later, Aidan had promised her – when the press lost interest and there didn’t need to be a police escort, or any of that. They’d scatter the ashes and have flowers and songs and everyone could come. Today it would just be Aidan, Aidan’s mother Pauline, and a few other people – she couldn’t remember who. Aidan had said their names to her and she had nodded without really hearing. She’d been crying at the time. She put a hand to her face and found that sure enough, she was crying now, too. The skin felt like it had been pulled off and stitched back on wrong – surely this wan, wet thing was not her own?