‘Get your lunchboxes, lads. We’re going home.’ I’ve already gathered their coats from the hooks outside the after-school club. Both boys are hugging my legs and I have to prise them off in order to get them ready. ‘This one is yours, right?’ I say to Noah, knowing full well it isn’t. He laughs and play-punches me. For some reason, I want to cry.
‘Is Mummy home yet?’ Noah asks. His hand is hot and slightly sticky as it nestles in mine as we walk along the pavement. To be honest, I don’t want to let go.
‘No, she’s not.’ I have absolutely no idea what to say. I never expected to feel this way about them when I took the job. Get in, get the information, get out. That was the basic brief. Mess up, and I knew I’d barely have a job any more, let alone anything undercover ever again. As it stands, making tea and shining the boss’s shoes would seem like a lucky escape.
‘Is Daddy home yet?’ Oscar says, echoing his brother. I give his hand a squeeze.
‘Stupid,’ Noah jibes. He worms his way between Oscar and me, trying to prise Oscar’s fingers out of mine. Gently, I ease him back to my other side.
‘He’s not home either, I’m afraid. But you know what? I don’t think it will be long before he returns.’
I’ve already had a word with my boss and he’s contacting the relevant people. I pray they can get in touch with James. Even though the boys were too young to remember last time they lost their mother, I don’t think they should have to face this mess without their father.
‘Anyone fancy sweets on the way home?’ I get the response I was expecting and we stop off at the newsagent on the way back. It takes a good ten minutes for the twins to fill a little paper bag with pink shrimps, raspberry chews and sherbet flying saucers. It takes their mind off what I tell them on the remainder of the walk.
‘So has Mummy gone away like Daddy?’ Oscar asks when I’ve finished explaining.
I expect Noah to come back with his usual cutting sibling remark but he remains thoughtful and silent, sucking on a sweet, as we approach the front door.
‘Yes. Mummy will be away for a little while. She did something naughty.’ I screw up my eyes as I unlock the door and let them in. For me, the rest of the day will be packing up and reporting back. But first, I need to make a phone call.
‘But you’ll be our mummy now, won’t you, Zoe?’ Oscar says, as if he’s got it all worked out.
I crouch down beside them as they untie their shoelaces and stuff their feet into their slippers. The bags of sweets are scrunched up in their palms as they struggle to take off their coats.
‘No, I won’t be able to look after you any more.’ There’s no point in lying to them. ‘I’m really sorry. I have liked being your nanny though.’ That’s the truth. I found myself caring more than I ever thought possible – even getting up in the night to check on them when I heard noises. I hadn’t meant to give Oscar nightmares and make him think there was a monster in his room.
I study each boy’s face in turn and my heart shrinks a little as their cheeks flush. Oscar bursts into tears.
‘Baby,’ Noah says meanly, but I know he’s feeling the same.
‘Am not!’
That’s when I know they will be OK. They have each other; they are two halves of a whole. And with that, they dash off to the sitting room and squabble over the remote control.
I know exactly how they feel.
*
The jimmied study door is still wide open. Elizabeth’s brothers’ unwelcome intrusion makes sense now, since I spoke with my boss after leaving Pip’s house. I didn’t know where else to go so I drove the car here first and then walked straight to the park. I sat on a bench, shell-shocked by the afternoon’s events. I dialled the number and told him what had happened. He revealed to me that the Sheehan brothers would have been searching for the same papers as me.
‘You did well, Heather,’ he said, as if it was never a given I would succeed. I allowed myself to enjoy the praise. ‘I know your work was curtailed, but several of the documents you sent through were key. The Jersey fraud squad has a solid case now, thanks to you.’
I’d figured this assignment was my last chance to impress. Cecelia’s demands had taken their toll on my career over the years. Fake sick days from me coupled with regular phone calls and crazed visits from her to the station made it almost impossible to do my work properly. She needed looking after and there was no one else to help. Sisters, just like twin brothers, have to stick together. I’d promised Mum that much before she died, leaving the world in her own fit of unreality and delusion eighteen months ago, and I’d whispered the same into Dad’s coffin before they shut the lid when I was a teenager. It was just Sissy and me now.
So I was baffled why they picked me for this particular undercover job. The hopeless maverick with a less-than-average track record was hardly top choice for a major fraud assignment. Perhaps I just looked more like a nanny than anyone else in the department.
‘Surely you’ve had experience with kids?’ the chief had said after he’d initially briefed me. He was almost telling me I had.
‘No,’ was my honest reply.
It had all happened very quickly once they decided I was the one. Zoe Harper was created out of nothing by a team dedicated to producing rock-solid backgrounds for undercover cops. As a relative newbie, I’d heard stories of course but never once thought I’d bag anything like this so early in my career.
I spent the next five days with my head buried in reports and fact sheets and discovered that my new CV contained details I didn’t even know about the real me. I studied books on childcare, including the Montessori method, and researched all the places I was supposed to have been with my previous families. It was a whirlwind submersion in someone else’s life, all to get evidence of an otherwise inaccessible accounting paper trail.
It was, to be honest, just what I needed because Cecelia was driving herself, and me, utterly mad.
‘You ride a bicycle, by the way,’ they’d told me.
‘I do?’ I hadn’t done that in a long while.
‘And you keep in touch with several of your previous charges.’ He’d handed me a bunch of letters, all opened and slightly creased, with childlike handwriting on the front, to an address I didn’t recognise. ‘It’s where you lived for a while,’ he’d said as I ran my finger over the unfamiliar village name. ‘Items such as this will be packed with your general possessions. They will be ready for collection twenty-four hours before you move in. Don’t even think of taking anything else with you. Assuming you get the job, that is,’ he’d added with a grimace that I took to be threatening. I was right. ‘And you’d better get the job,’ he’d finished. ‘The costs if you don’t are innumerable. We’re working with the Securities Exchange Commission in Washington on this one and don’t want to look like a bunch of fools. It’s a tiny part of the whole investigation but you’re in at ground level and have a chance to help make a bit of history.’
I’d swallowed, listening intently, feeling absolutely terrified.
‘Hundreds of trust funds in offshore centres around the world have been stuffed with funds that have, let’s say, a less than healthy provenance. Top that with the trusts being illegally managed – enter our Jersey connection – and you’ve touched the tip of a very large worldwide money-laundering scam.’
He’d gone on to tell me that 228 million dollars had been moved to various offshore accounts around the world from the United States a year ago in the aftermath of a pump-and-dump scam. Following an internet-manufactured frenzy, share prices for Chencorp, a new company boasting an overinflated contract with China to supply educational materials, sky-rocketed and left the major shareholders filthy rich.
‘The pump,’ he’d announced.
I didn’t really know what he meant and kind of glazed over, just wanting to get on with what I had to do, but then he told me that a share price crash had naturally followed the massive sale of stock – the dump – and the genuine investors – ‘Your average Joe like
me and you’ – lost all their money.
I thought about this. I was starting to understand, and I really felt for the ‘average Joes’ my boss was referring to. Things like that weren’t fair, especially when he told me that the perpetrators got off with a non-custodial sentence and a minuscule payback in comparison to what they made.
‘The thing is, they’re key philanthropic figures, Heather,’ he’d said when I grumbled on about capitalists. ‘They make regular donations to many major research facilities, medical institutions, the space programme, education – you name it. It’s just how the world works. The best we can do is make it as hard as possible for them. And to do that, I need little old you in this house in rainy Birmingham looking after those kids.’
I was up for the challenge.
It turned out the Sheehan brothers were only a very small part of the criminal activity, and without the paperwork I discovered they might have got off on a technicality. My boss assured me that with the evidence I’d provided in the form of letters, printed emails and statements, there was no way they could claim they didn’t know the provenance of the money they were laundering on behalf of their clients. They were bang to rights and would go to trial in the spring.
Elizabeth Sheehan hadn’t known anything about her brothers’ activities. Her legal work had been at the opposite end of the social spectrum. And having got to know him a little before he’d left, it was a shame that James hadn’t come out quite so clean. His involvement with the brothers was now a matter for the Navy after it was discovered he’d conveniently ‘inherited’ illegal trust funds in Elizabeth’s name. There would be a full Naval inquiry and no doubt a dismissal from service.
‘If in doubt, photograph everything,’ my boss had said, and it stuck in my mind. ‘Nearly everything,’ he laughed at the end of our phone call. He told me he’d already destroyed the images of the irrelevant social work files I’d taken to be on the safe side. I’d been instructed, over the course of several weeks, to copy everything I could get my hands on, from the contents of filing cabinets to messy papers in the kitchen drawer. I was simply following my brief and, by all accounts, had given them exactly what they needed.
However, I’d never expected to feel so dreadful at the prospect of leaving the household just as Claudia was due to give birth. It felt as if I was well and truly doing the dirty on her. ‘We’ll feed you a plausible reason to leave,’ my boss had told me, but, of course, a reason was never needed.
Right now, I’m feeling stunned, empty, bereft and certainly very low at the prospect of what I know I have to do.
While the boys are watching television, I make the phone call I have been dreading. They will need a short-notice foster home, and I asked my boss to allow me to deal with this myself. I take a deep breath and make the call to Social Services.
*
‘I’m home,’ I sing out tentatively. It feels odd saying it. The flat smells of strawberries and coffee. Cecelia is sunk into the couch with four boxes of the ripe red fruit arranged around her. She grins up at me. It feels as if I’ve never been away.
‘Heather,’ she says sweetly, almost convincing me everything’s normal. I pray she’s having a good day. There are things we need to discuss.
‘Sissy,’ I say, launching straight in. ‘I’ve been thinking. Things are going to get better around here.’ I stand with winter steaming off me. I remove my jacket.
She doesn’t react. Rather, she puts the biggest strawberry I’ve ever seen into her mouth. She looks dreamy and unreal.
Look after your sister, Heather, Mum had said. She’s going to need you for the rest of her life. Promise me you’ll take care of her no matter what.
‘Look, I don’t know if I nearly lost my job because of you or kept it because of you.’ It’s the start of what I have to tell her, things that I’ve just decided on the walk home but that I’ve been thinking about for ages. ‘I want to look after you, Sissy, honestly I do, but things are going to have to change. You’re going to have to change.’ I have her attention. ‘I’m a police officer and it’s a really tough job. I need your help.’
Her eyes don’t divulge whether she’s known this all along and just forgotten it, or if it’s the shock of the century. Either way, she keeps perfectly still.
‘We have to agree on some things.’
Cecelia doesn’t have a clue about my undercover work and I don’t intend to tell her. She remembers that as a geeky eighteen-year-old I joined the force in a fit of panic. I had no idea what to do with my life. I was the clunky average-achiever at school whereas Cecelia was always the arty, creative and fanciful one. She had to be the centre of attention but, unbeknown to her, I was in the background keeping the bullies at bay. Her own secret security guard. It’s always been my job to look after her.
These days, in her more lucid moments, she gets angry and defiant when I shrug and tell her I’m in between jobs, that I’ve left the force and I work in a bar, that I’m a cleaner or a door-to-door salesman. It explains my erratic hours, my sometimes odd clothing, and it’s often loosely the truth depending on the case, but the spoilt side of Sissy still comes thrashing out. She senses when I’m being shifty and she feels threatened. As far as she is concerned, I am alive solely to look after her. And mostly I do.
But in the last year or two, her grasp of reality has loosened and her focus has shifted from obsessing about my work to wanting a baby. The doctor said it might be all the changes of medication she’s had. They can’t seem to find the right one.
‘I’ve been thinking long and hard about stuff.’ I sit down beside her. The sofa groans beneath us. ‘About us, Sissy.’
‘Strawberry?’ she says, holding one out. ‘I want to make edible jewellery.’ She holds the fruit against my neck.
‘For a start, we’re going to move into a new flat.’ It will be a blessed relief to get out of this tiny place.
Cecelia lowers her hand and stares at the strawberry before licking it. It’s as if she hasn’t heard me or digested the implications.
‘We can have a good old clear-out,’ I say. ‘Get somewhere better, somewhere with more room for you to make your jewellery.’ She’s at her best when she’s creating. More volatile and unpredictable, certainly, but somehow she seems more alive. I prefer her that way; the way she was meant to be.
Cecelia’s got a streak of your mother running through her, Dad told me once. When we’re dead and buried, you’ll have your work cut out with that one. He’d laughed and lit a cigarette, and died a few months later. Responsibility passed down the line. It sometimes seems as if our childhood happened to someone else.
Cecelia laughs and pops the strawberry in her mouth. When she bites, juice dribbles out from between her lips. ‘Where will we move to?’ she says incredulously. ‘We never move.’
‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘So it’s about time we did.’
I watch her scan the contents of the flat, mentally packing it all up, making sure I don’t chuck out her much-prized clutter.
‘I’ve got a bit of money saved up,’ I tell her. ‘I can use it as a deposit. And I might be up for a promotion soon.’ She barely reacts to my good news, but that’s just Sissy. My boss sent me an email telling me to see him next week. He wants me to apply for an internal vacancy.
‘We could have a party,’ she suggests. ‘And a cat. And maybe I could get a little shop again.
I sigh. I’d better get on with what I really want to say before she overthinks my plan. ‘You know those little twin boys I told you about?’ I curl my fingers into my palms, hoping she’ll take my lead. Cecelia tries to appear disinterested but nods all the same. Apart from anything, I want someone to know the twins’ fate so it isn’t consigned solely to my thoughts. ‘They’re going to a foster home.’ After that, I don’t know what will become of them. It depends on their father’s fate. ‘And talking of children . . . of babies . . .’ I stumble.
She’s not listening to me.
‘Cecelia,’ I say, taking both her
hands in mine. Her heavy eyes try to focus. ‘We’ve got to get one thing straight. You’re not going to have a baby. Do you understand me?’
The blank look gives nothing away.
‘I know you get these ideas in your head and it all seems exciting and wonderful, but believe me, you’re better off concentrating on your designs. Put all your energy into that, will you?’
‘I see,’ she says flatly. I can see the beginnings of an outburst swelling from her feet up. She jams her knees together and locks her arms in a defiant embrace around her body. Then the deep breath in comes, sucking up the entire room, followed by the flushed cheeks, the clenched jaw and the sharpening of her stare. Followed by nothing. The calm before the storm. I know it so well.
‘I’m serious, Sissy. I’m run ragged after what you’ve put me through. I thought I was doing the right thing by trying to indulge your demands, but it got way out of hand. I was as much to blame as you, to be honest, and I should have said a firm no from the start.’
There. It’s out. I was lured into a dark corner of Cecelia’s mind and got caught up in the torrent of her desire. There’s no way she could look after a baby, despite me believing it could be just what she needed, and there was no way I wanted to be pregnant either. I would have had to give up work and take care of the poor little thing myself. That was never in my life’s plan.
‘I want to put it all behind us, Sissy, and pretend it never happened. I’m not proud of what I did, but I’ll hear no more about babies, right?’ I take her by the shoulders and force her to look at me.
‘You have no idea how much I want a baby,’ she whispers in a voice that throws me. For the first time in ages, Cecelia sounds . . . normal, sincere, as if her thoughts have come from somewhere sane. ‘I have always wanted a baby.’
‘Oh, you poor thing,’ I say, and I can’t help but think of Claudia for a moment.
‘Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve had this huge desire to take care of a baby. To love it, to feed it, to keep it warm and watch it grow up.’ There’s a pause. A still moment of memory. ‘I had this doll,’ she continues, with tears in her eyes. ‘And I prayed it would come to life. I did all kinds of magic to make it real, but it just stayed a cold lump of plastic.’
Until You're Mine Page 33
