The Death of Her

by Debbie Howells

  38

  Jack

  He remembered that feeling of having no peace. Not in the quiet moments, or in the bittersweetness of memories, or the dead of night. Just a restlessness, a constant searching, clinging to the most fragile hope.

  The police search had wound down. Jack had caught sight of Evie once or twice, walking through the woods alone, slightly lost-looking. Respecting her privacy, he’d kept his distance, until the morning he lost Beamer – and Evie found him.

  As she walked towards him, he could see how thin she still was, just skin and bone, under the clothes that swamped her.

  ‘Sorry.’ He stopped as Beamer came bounding up to him. ‘Once he gets on the trail of a rabbit, there’s no stopping him.’

  ‘I thought he might be lost.’ She spoke quietly, her voice flat.

  Jack hesitated before asking. ‘How are you?’

  ‘OK.’ But her voice was trembling.

  ‘Any news?’ Kicking himself for asking, because if there was, the chances were he would know before she did. Anyway, he could tell from her demeanour there had been no good news. And if there had, whether he’d been to the police station or not, he would have heard.

  ‘No.’ She paused, before looking up at him, her eyes filled with tears. ‘There are still these different versions of my life. So many people have told me things I don’t recall. I still don’t remember what happened to Leah – only what they’ve told me. But it’s there. I remember being frantic with worry, the police coming to interview me . . .’ She looked desperate.

  Jack didn’t know what to say to her. The focus had switched from a missing child to an attack on a woman suspected of having mental health problems; as if one precluded the other, that the two were mutually exclusive. They were no nearer finding out who had attacked Evie, meaning she still, at least, had a police guard.

  ‘So, you’re just walking,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’ Her voice wavered. ‘I needed to get out of the house.’

  He paused. ‘Can I walk with you?’

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  Jack let her lead the way. However muddled her head, there were clearly places she wanted to seek out. Every so often Beamer lunged after a rabbit, or a squirrel gathering winter fodder, but he did so half-heartedly, for the most part trotting along with them.

  ‘I might get a dog,’ she said suddenly. ‘Now I don’t have a cat.’

  ‘He hasn’t come back?’ A dog would be a good idea for her. Company, a pair of sharp ears.

  ‘No.’

  Thinking of the scream he’d heard in the woods near Evie’s that night, Jack let the subject drop. For a while they didn’t speak. Then, as the path widened enough for them to walk side by side, she said, ‘I’m sorry about your son.’

  Jack was taken by surprise. She had enough on her mind without worrying about him. Most people didn’t know what to say, choosing instead to stay silent. But Evie wasn’t most people. She understood.

  ‘How do you cope?’

  There was honest compassion in her voice. She wasn’t prying, but it made Jack suspect that whatever she told him, a small part of her was holding on to hope.

  ‘Day by day,’ he said briefly. ‘But also, you have no choice. When someone’s life is taken so suddenly, especially a young person, it makes you want to make the most of every second you have. Not to waste it, because you’re here and they’re not. But, God – it’ll never make sense. He was seventeen. Had everything to live for . . .’ Familiar emotion overcame him. His voice cracked. There was more he wanted to say, like how he wanted to talk about Josh, all the time. It was other people who couldn’t cope with it. You got fed up with the looks of pity and the platitudes. ‘It takes time,’ was a favourite. He’d lost count of how many times people had said that to him, as if they knew. They didn’t, of course. It didn’t matter how much time you gave it. You didn’t get over the loss of your child.

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘I can understand,’ she said at last. ‘How it completely changes everything.’

  They fell into silence as they kept walking, further than he normally went. Evie said little, her head moving now and then as she took in their surroundings. No matter what she said, she was still looking. It wouldn’t take much for her to question what she’d been convinced of. Jack watched her, aware of the confusion that must be clouding her mind, wary also of making it worse for her.

  Eventually the woods thinned out. Ahead of them were fields edged with stone walls, dozens of sheep grazing them. She looked unsure.

  ‘We could keep going?’ he suggested. ‘Unless there’s anywhere you need to be?’

  She shook her head. ‘Not really.’

  ‘If we keep walking, we can pick up the coast path. Over there.’ Jack pointed, and as her eyes followed, he saw them light up as she saw the sea in the distance, a shimmer of blue.

  ‘It’s a long way,’ she said quietly.

  He’d forgotten how frail she was. ‘Maybe too far.’

  ‘I think so.’ She stood there, staring towards the horizon. ‘I still haven’t found any of her things.’ As she whispered it, there was a blankness in her eyes. Jack frowned. He knew from experience how much clutter came with small children. You wouldn’t have thought it was possible to remove everything a child left in its wake. Not just clothes, but the detritus of toys and tiny treasures children collect.

  ‘What about photos?’

  She shook her head, a sadness in her eyes.

  Jack was silent, trying to imagine how she was feeling.

  ‘I found a pebble,’ she said suddenly. ‘Under the sofa. All of a sudden, I felt hopeful, because I could remember the day Angel found it. We’d been planting bulbs last autumn, her little hands in the crumbling earth next to mine, when she’d pulled it out, brushing the soil off. I even remember our conversation.

  ‘“It’s a bone, Mummy.”

  ‘“Is it? Shall we wash it and see?”

  ‘“It might be a dinosaur’s.” That’s what she told me, as she turned it this way and that.’

  She went on. ‘It wasn’t really a bone.’ Her voice was distant again. ‘Just shaped enough like one to spark her imagination in a hundred directions. She brought it inside. She had a collection of treasures – a black and white feather and the shell of a blackbird’s egg which she kept on her windowsill, along with her hairclips and plastic bracelets and things. And they’ve all gone.’ Her eyes were filled with tears. ‘At least, that’s what I remember. I guess I made it all up.’

  ‘But surely . . .’ Jack was confused. ‘If your memories are that clear . . .’

  She interrupted. ‘You know what you said to me, about trusting my gut? I’ve really thought about that. I wish it worked for me.’

  ‘It may yet.’ Jack was still convinced she shouldn’t give up.

  She wiped her eyes, then turned to look at him. ‘It’s as though everything’s there, in my head, but my brain puts the wrong things together. My memories are stories.’ Her voice shook. ‘Stories I want to believe, because they feel so real. I have to keep reminding myself they’re not.’

  ‘People often tell different versions of the same story,’ Jack suggested. ‘And yours aren’t so very far apart.’

  ‘They’re far enough apart. And there’s what happened with Leah. I’ve seen photos of her. In my head, she and Angel . . .’ She looked scared. ‘They’re so alike. I don’t know what to think.’

  ‘No.’ It was beyond anything he’d experienced. He knew that memory could be unreliable; that false memories could be implanted. But that wasn’t what this was. He’d never seen anyone so confused.

  ‘Everyone tells me I need time.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘But the more memories that come back to me, the fewer I trust.’ She paused for a moment. ‘I just want it all to go away.’ There was anger in her voice. ‘I wish I could go back to before. Don’t you wish that? That you could go back?’

  ‘Yes.’ Of course he did. He’d give anything for Josh to sti
ll be here. His death had changed Jack. He wasn’t the same person he used to be. It had changed his marriage too, in the worst way. Nothing was the same, but that was life.

  Talking about Josh brought a wave of painful, nostalgic memories flooding back. It still got him, a melancholic yearning for something lost forever.

  ‘It’s no good just remembering, is it?’ Anxiety flashed in her eyes. ‘It’s not enough – for the police and for me, too. If Angel’s real, she’s got to be there, Jack. In my brain. If only someone could splice it out, that sliver that holds her face, or a moment from her childhood, so that we had something tangible. And if it wasn’t there, then we’d know.’

  Sensing her desperation, her frustration, he could only nod.

  ‘If I had her things,’ Evie shook her head. ‘You know how they make you think of a particular time – like I can remember the day I gave her Pony. And when she put on the little bracelet I gave her for her birthday . . .’

  Suddenly Jack thought of something. He got out his phone, scrolling through the photos until he found what he was looking for. ‘Do you recognize this?’

  Evie stared at the photo of the pendant the bird dropped, the day he found Tamsyn’s body, recognition dawning on her face. ‘It’s Tamsyn’s.’ She looked at Jack. ‘I’m not making it up.’

  He didn’t think she was. He didn’t tell Evie where he’d found it. ‘You’re sure?’

  Her face was pale as she nodded. ‘I gave it to her.’

  ‘Evie befriended Tamsyn, by the sound of things.’ Jack had called Abbie to let her know. ‘She says she used to leave Angel with her occasionally, when she had to go out.’

  ‘It could explain why no one saw her with a child.’ Abbie was silent for a moment.

  It explained a lot, Jack was thinking. Evie hadn’t left her daughter alone. She’d timed her deliveries to the farm shop and any shopping she needed to do so that they coincided with Tamsyn’s visits.

  ‘According to Forensics, Tamsyn died around the same time as the attack on Evie,’ Abbie told him. ‘It fits with our theory about Tamsyn seeing what happened.’

  ‘Maybe she was staying at Jessamine Cottage. And whoever is behind this needed her out of the way.’ Jack was thinking how easy it would have been for the killer. Everyone was so used to Tamsyn disappearing that no one missed her.

  39

  That winter wasn’t far away could be seen in the shortening days and the falling of the leaves; autumnal anti-cyclonic gloom giving way to night frosts and cold sunshine. Jack thought about Evie often, walking with her now and then, when he wasn’t working. Her eyes would be pinned to the ground, hunting for anything that the searches may have missed, only occasionally flickering elsewhere, along hazy lines of long-ago planted trees, or upwards through the tangle of branches towards the sky.

  He wished he could have given her some answers. Words of wisdom that would have helped her when she most needed it, but who was he to explain what the grand plan was? There were two certainties in this life. You were born and you died. The bit in between, either you embraced it and made the most of it, or you sat back and let it happen around you. Either way, it was brief.

  He had a suspicion that Evie fell into the latter category. Life was too short to waste in the wrong places, in stifling situations with the wrong people. After leaving Nick, she hadn’t been sure how she’d like living here, she told him. But as the months went by, the surroundings had crept under her skin and taken root. Or maybe it was the ghosts, she ventured, because she could almost feel them, the ghosts of the people who had been born and had died during the centuries that had passed while the woods had grown up. It made you wonder how many people had walked where they had, because an oak tree could live for a thousand years.

  Jack thought of the stag. Then Josh.

  They walked a different way every time, kicking through leaves, scanning low branches for a ripped shred of familiar fabric, finding none. During one of their walks, she told him that the isolation which she’d come to love was now her enemy, because there were too many places to hide.

  A couple of days passed when he didn’t see her. Then one grey, damp morning, from deep in the woods, he heard a scream. He broke into a run. There was another scream. Jack ran faster.

  Somehow, he knew it was her. ‘Evie?’ His voice echoed through the trees, as beside him Beamer barked. ‘Evie? Are you there?’

  She was crashing through the woods, not far from them.

  ‘Evie? Wait! Where are you?’ Suddenly, Beamer ran off ahead. The crashing stopped and he heard her call him.

  ‘Jack?’

  He followed the sound of her voice, shocked when he caught up with her. Her eyes were wide and red with crying, her breath coming in gasps.

  ‘I found something, quick, follow me . . .’ He couldn’t get a word in. ‘This way, I need to show you.’

  He followed her.

  She stopped abruptly, turning round with a look of panic on her face. ‘I can’t find them. I don’t know where we are.’

  ‘Find what?’ Jack had no idea what she was talking about.

  ‘Graves, Jack. In amongst the trees. Two graves.’

  A shiver ran down his spine. He could see why she was so upset. ‘Think, Evie. Which way were you walking?’ They were on one of the main paths that they both knew well.

  ‘I – I’m not sure.’ It wasn’t just her voice that shook. Her whole body seemed to be shaking uncontrollably.

  Jack took her arm. ‘Come on. Let’s keep going straight on.’

  They walked only a few yards before she veered off to the left and took a different path. It was narrow and overhung by brambles, so that if you didn’t know it was there, you’d walk straight past it.

  ‘Are you sure this is right?’ he asked, then watched the back of her head move as she nodded her reply. A few metres further on, she stopped, pointing directly ahead of them. ‘There.’

  He tried to see where she was looking, then walked past her to take a closer look. At first, under the covering of fallen leaves, it was hard to make them out, but as he focused, he could see what she’d found. Side by side, unmistakeably, were two graves. One of them filled in, scattered with a covering of leaves, the other empty. He got out his phone.

  It took two hours for Miller and Evans to find them on one of the main paths, before they could lead them to where the graves were.

  ‘Thanks for showing us. Forensics are on their way. Would you like me to escort Evie home?’ Miller was clearly aware of how vulnerable Evie was.

  ‘I’ll go with her.’ Jack wanted to stay, but he was worried about Evie. ‘Call me when you know more,’ he said to Miller. ‘Evie? Shall we head back?’

  He could see that she too was torn between staying and going. Between logic and fear that the daughter she wasn’t sure she had might be lying under the mound of earth and fallen leaves. No way should she be here when they dug up the grave. ‘Come on.’ He took her arm. ‘I’ll walk you home.’

  As they walked, she didn’t speak. Jack could imagine the scenarios she was running through her head, in impossible turmoil – and limbo.

  Who knew what was in the grave – or who the open one was intended for. Satanists came to mind again. The problem was, these groups kept themselves well hidden, by whatever means it took. When the occasional animal went missing, no one bothered too much. You could blame foxes or hit-and-run drivers. But not when it was a person. God, he hoped it was an animal in there.

  Then he was thinking of Tamsyn again. It had become clear that she bunked off school and lived wild, sometimes for weeks at a time. He was reminded again of what his old boss used to say. Feral children know where to hide.

  If Tamsyn had been feral, that was largely down to her mother. Having lost his own child, it incensed Jack all the more. Uncaring mothers were guilty of a multitude of sins. And now, at least in part because of Mrs Morgan’s, Tamsyn was dead.

  When they reached Jessamine Cottage, Evie barely said goodbye to him. Jack cou
ld see fear eating away at her. She’d seemed so accepting, but as he watched her, he realized that, like him, she hadn’t given up on finding her daughter. Not deep inside.

  ‘Will you be OK?’ He was worried about her. The house was unlit, and it was too early for her police guard to be here. As far as he knew, she’d be alone.

  She nodded, then turned to go in. He stood watching until she’d gone inside and closed the door.

  Back at home, Jack couldn’t get the image of her out of his mind, haunted by what she had probably been thinking since they found the graves. In the end, he decided to go back and check on her.

  It was dark by the time he knocked on Evie’s door, carrying a dish. Concerned that she might not be eating, on the spur of the moment he’d brought the casserole he’d made for his own dinner. There was no answer. She clearly had nothing left, not even a polite hello for whoever had come to intrude. Intrusions into your small, desolate world – that’s what people became when they continually arrived without warning, especially when, like Evie, you were private. He pushed the door open and walked in.

  ‘Hello? Evie? It’s Jack.’

  There was no reply. Placing the dish on the kitchen table, he carried on through to the sitting room. She was tiny, curled up on her sofa, as though finding the graves had somehow diminished her size. Looking around the room, he noticed it was untidy, clothes thrown over the back of a chair, dirty plates left on the low coffee tables. A manifestation of her life now.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ He paused. ‘I thought you should eat.’

  Her head came up as his voice startled her. Jack stood there awkwardly. ‘I brought you food. I hope you don’t mind . . .’ He hedged, suddenly unsure how she felt about him letting himself into her house like this. ‘It’s just a casserole.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she replied, her response automatic. Her eyes drifted away from him.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind – I let myself in . . .’ He was repeating himself, trying to get her attention, but she seemed out of it. ‘The door was unlocked. Your police guard’s outside – he saw me come in.’ Recognizing Miller in the car, Jack had knocked on the car window but hadn’t stopped. Miller had been talking on his phone. Jack hesitated. ‘I’ll put some on a plate, shall I? It’s chicken – home-made.’