by Sibel Hodge
‘Stop it!’ Nadia said. ‘Bickering amongst ourselves isn’t going to make this go away.’
I took a few deep breaths to temper down my annoyance with Ethan and compose myself again. He was upset. He was saying things he didn’t mean. I could understand that. It was how he dealt with stress – getting angry instead of talking about his feelings. We were all stressed. And really, he was right. I was responsible for all the snowballing heartbreak by not keeping my stupid, big mouth shut.
But could you have kept Tom’s confession a secret? Could you really have said nothing? I asked myself the same questions I’d asked a million times since. I still didn’t have an answer.
Finally, I said, ‘I think we could be vague to Charlotte and Anna about the garage. Obviously, we’ll have to tell them Tom knew something, but we can just say that because of the Alzheimer’s he didn’t know what he was talking about and was confused. We’ll say the police are investigating but nothing’s clear at the moment, and we don’t know how Katie’s body got there.’
Which is what we did. Not surprisingly, there were more emotional outbursts.
‘I’ll never be able to leave the house again! What are all my friends going to say when they see me?’ Charlotte screamed.
‘Mum, I don’t want to live there anymore,’ Anna wailed. ‘I can’t stay in the same place as a skeleton. What about ghosts?’
Anna threw herself down on the sofa in between Ethan and me.
‘Darling, there are no such thing as ghosts.’ Ethan scooched closer and kissed her forehead.
‘How do you know?’ she challenged.
‘Everyone in the village is going to know that Granddad killed someone. They’ll hate us.’ Charlotte’s lower lip trembled as she tried hard not to cry.
‘You’ll be starting sixth form college after the holidays; you’ll meet new people who aren’t from the village or your school so it won’t be as bad as you think. And we don’t know he did kill someone at the moment.’ Nadia reached for Charlotte.
‘But it’ll be in the papers, won’t it? Everyone will know our name.’ Charlotte put her hand on her hip, tapping her foot anxiously. ‘We’ll have to move house!’
‘And even if Granddad was confused, how would he know where her skeleton was if he didn’t have anything to do with it?’ Anna sobbed, her cheeks wet.
‘That’s what the police are trying to find out, sweetheart.’ I wiped away her tears with my hand.
‘I’m not going back. You can’t make me go back there. I can’t live in that house!’
‘Nadia will let us stay here for a few days.’ I looked to Nadia helplessly. ‘But we’ll have to go back at some point.’
‘My life is ruined now!’ Anna jumped up and ran out of the room. The downstairs bathroom door slammed then locked, and she shouted out a muffled, ‘I’m staying in here and never coming out!’
Ethan got up and walked out the front door. Charlotte stormed off up the stairs. Nadia gathered some ingredients together to start baking a batch of scones.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I needed to get out of the house and clear my head. The walls were oppressive and claustrophobic, stifling me. I needed to breathe fresh air. Feel the wind on my face. Uncoil my frayed nerves and cramping stomach. Try to outrun the guilt for bringing this upon us all.
I left Anna in the bathroom. I couldn’t deal with her at the moment. As soon as I had that thought I immediately felt guilty. Again. The guilt was just piling up by the second. Anna’s concerns were legitimate. Well, apart from the ghost bit. She was just being a normal twelve-year-old. Even I found it hard eating and sleeping and breathing just metres away from where Katie had been buried. But what choice did we have? We couldn’t stay in someone else’s house indefinitely. Ethan and I would need to make a decision about selling the barn now, but who would want it? A body buried underneath it would completely put off any prospective buyers, unless they were someone like Fred West.
No, the whole thing was a mess, and at that moment I hated Tom. How could he do this to us? How could he put us all through it? Put me in such an impossible position. I was damned if I didn’t tell someone about it and damned if I did. He’d said he wanted to protect his family but he was just poisoning us all, breaking up the thing he valued the most. He had us all fighting and crying. Part of me wished Tom had kept his horrific secret until his death. Some things are better not known.
My first thought was to go to Durdle Door and walk along the cliff edge, but it would only remind me of Tom and I wanted to forget about him for a while. Even if Nadia and Ethan didn’t approve, I still needed to give my condolences to Rose. I tried to put myself in her place as I’d asked Ethan to do. How would I feel if Jack confessed to killing Anna and Katie came round to apologise? How could I hold it against her, his daughter? The sins of the father are not the sins of the rest of the family. In my scenario, Katie wouldn’t have been any more responsible for Anna’s death than I was now for hers. So I absolutely had to go. It was the right thing to do.
I almost wished I was invisible as I hurried past the primary school, which was thankfully now closed for the summer holidays. The mums dropping off their kids were always the worst for village gossip. ‘I heard that so and so’s dad was off shagging so and so’s mum’; ‘Did you see how much weight so and so’s put on? She’s enormous! What are the parents feeding her?’; ‘Well, I heard so and so forgot her kid’s sports day. Poor little thing had to do the village fun run in her skirt!’ (That had probably been me they were talking about, actually.) It was one of the few things I hated about being a parent. That many women together in one place could never be a good thing, I always thought.
I passed a grungy teenager sporting a black Mohican with bleached tips, dressed in black jeans, a long-sleeved black T-shirt and black Doc Martens (in the height of a sweltering July day, seriously? Hadn’t anyone told him black absorbed the sun the most?). He chewed on some gum and blew a huge bubble with it as I walked by.
As I headed past the surgery, I saw Emily Carver, a widow whose husband had died of bowel cancer last year.
Don’t let her see me. Please don’t let her see me.
I increased my pace, head down, hoping she’d be turning off before she got to me, but no such luck.
Oh, God! Please don’t let her have heard the news.
I beamed at her brightly and asked how she was, the words coming out automatically. Even my professional nursing smile was fixed firmly in place. Hopefully she didn’t notice me holding my breath, bracing myself for her to ask what was all this she’d heard about Tom and Katie and our garage. Luckily for me, she’d been stuck in the house for weeks because she’d had that horrible virus that was going round, so she hadn’t heard what was going on. I shuffled from one foot to the other, trying to listen politely as she raved on about how it was the hottest July day for twenty-eight years, and wasn’t that amazing, just in time for the kids breaking up, too. Blah, blah, blah, who gives a shit? I thought.
After I managed to get away, I carried on past the duck pond, pausing in front of it. There was a mother duck swimming with four ducklings riding the fanned ripple of water close behind her. A memory of Katie flashed into my head. We were probably about ten and we’d brought some bread to feed the ducks, which I’ve since discovered is the worst thing for them. Actually, I’d brought the bread and was trying to feed them. Katie kept nicking it and stuffing it in her mouth like she hadn’t eaten for a week, which, on reflection, she probably hadn’t. I should’ve guessed something, I supposed, even then. The bread was stale and mouldy in parts, but she just picked those bits off and carried on. I was having a go at her for stealing their food, but instead of telling me she was starving, that Rose and Jack didn’t bother to feed her because they spent their unemployment benefit on booze, she just stared out at the pond, chewing quickly and swallowing so loud it frightened a mother duck on our side, causing i
t to jump into the water and quickly swim across the pond in the other direction to get away from us.
‘Look, she’s forgotten one.’ Katie pointed to a tiny lone duckling tottering around the surrounding grass on wobbly webbed feet. A ginger tom cat was right behind it, crouched low in the grass, all muscles taut and ready to launch itself in an attack on the poor little thing. Katie had dropped the bag of food, shooed the cat away and picked up the duckling in her hand. Taking it round to the other side of the pond, she’d placed it gently in the water next to its mum, saving the day and reuniting them.
Katie could be cruel and a bitch. She could be selfish and lie and steal and betray me. But she could also be kind and warm and funny and caring. And no matter what, she didn’t deserve to die.
I swallowed back the tears and carried on to Rose’s house. The curtain at the front window was closed again. I knocked on the door as the moisture evaporated in my mouth and the sweat chilled against my skin.
No answer. I knocked again.
I glanced around, looking up and down the street. When I looked back I thought I saw the edge of the curtain drop back into place. I knocked again but there was still no response so I walked home, head down, palms sweating.
I collected Poppy from our house and walked along the path at the side and into the woods, trying to rid my mind of everything that had happened. But every time I forced the thoughts away, they hurtled straight back. Katie’s baby would be twenty-five years old now if it had lived. What was Katie thinking when she had the idea to run away? She couldn’t support herself financially on her meagre earnings from the shop, and it would be even worse with a baby on the way, but she’d still had the intention to leave the village. She must’ve had a plan, and that plan would involve getting money from somewhere to support herself.
I’ve got something he wants and I’m going to make him pay.
She was going to blackmail the father, I was sure of it. Her words made total sense now. She must’ve pre-arranged to meet her killer at the barn. But was that person Chris or Tom? We wouldn’t know until the results of the DNA test.
It was a Sunday when she wrote the letter to Rose and Jack and then disappeared, which meant none of the contractors would’ve been working on site so there would’ve been no witnesses. Tom always insisted on having Sundays off so he could spend time with his family, and he’d made sure his employees didn’t work then, either. I tried to picture what stage the renovation was at then, but only vague images came into my head. Because of its historic importance, the barn was a listed building, so the original walls made of local stone had to remain in place and couldn’t be knocked down, only repaired. I remembered them all being in situ throughout the renovation work. Since Katie was buried under the garage floor, the foundations for it would have surely already been dug out at that stage. When we bought the property from Tom he’d told us he’d made the foundations in the garage suitable to take a two-storey extension in case he ever wanted to build a studio or office over it. And all that time her body had been rotting away underneath it.
As I opened our front gates, I saw Chris sitting on our doorstep, his head in his hands. He glanced up, looking dishevelled and ravaged. His hair, usually kept closely clippered, was sprouting out in all uneven directions, like patchy grass. His sallow cheeks were covered in several days’ worth of stubble. There were dark hollows beneath his eyes.
‘Hi,’ I said as Poppy struggled on the lead, trying to run off and greet him.
‘Hi.’
I walked towards him. ‘Are you OK?’
He shook his head, ignoring Poppy nuzzling her snout into his hand. ‘I . . . I just wanted to sit here for a while.’
I frowned. ‘Why?’
‘I wanted to say goodbye to her.’ He clasped his hands behind his head, elbows sticking out in the air. His T-shirt lifted, revealing a tanned, toned stomach. He stared at the ground. ‘I can’t believe she was pregnant.’
I didn’t know what to do. What if Chris was the father? What if he had something to do with Katie’s death? But then a tiny inner voice told me to stop being crazy. Of course he hadn’t. I knew him. He was kind and funny and sweet. The shy, quiet one.
Yes, but isn’t it just as crazy to think that Tom did it? You knew him, too. Or thought you did. And what is it they always say about the quiet ones?
Had Katie made fun of Chris, taunted him, and he lost his temper and snapped? Is that what got her killed in the end?
Don’t be ridiculous!
I settled for, ‘Do you want to come inside?’
‘No.’
‘Do you remember what was happening here with the renovation when Katie went missing?’ I asked. ‘Do you remember working on the garage floor with Tom? Or was there another builder working on them?’
He shook his head in response, his gaze drifting to the garage. An expression passed over his face for a brief second and then it was gone, too fleeting for me to work out what it was. ‘When you’re that age, you think you know everything, don’t you? Think you’re capable of anything. If she wasn’t running away it wouldn’t have happened.’
‘What are you saying, Chris? How can you know that?’ A feeling of dread crept up my spine, as if in anticipation of a confession. ‘Do you know what happened to her? Why Tom confessed? You can talk to me, Chris, you know that.’
He looked at me, but I don’t think he was really seeing me. Before he stood up and walked away, he said, ‘The others, they didn’t like her. You’re the only one who understands.’
Except I didn’t understand anything. Not then.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The logistics of staying at Nadia’s were fairly easy since she had two spare rooms. It was the atmosphere that was hard to take. It wasn’t just Ethan and I that were showing signs of cracks in our relationship. When Lucas returned, he and Nadia bickered like crazy. Nadia was also angry with me about going to the police and heartbroken about Tom’s suicide, but she was trying to hide it. Anna didn’t want to talk much, which was completely unlike her usual chatterbox self. Most of the time she stayed in the spare bedroom on her laptop or was in Charlotte’s room watching DVDs. When I went upstairs, I could hear their hushed tones as they whispered secretly to each other behind closed doors. Charlotte had complained about being a ‘prisoner in her own home’ at breakfast that morning and Anna had replied, ‘Did you know prisoners on death row only get about an hour out of their cells every day?’ to which Charlotte had countered, ‘Yes, but they’re guilty. We haven’t done anything wrong.’ Anna shook her head and added, ‘They might not be guilty, though. Do you know how many innocent prisoners get convicted each year?’
I’d slammed my hand on the dining room table. ‘Stop talking about death row prisoners! This is not the same thing at all. And until we find out what really happened at our house, we just need to get on with things as best we can. This is difficult for all of us, and Granddad may very well be innocent, too.’ Although I didn’t believe that last part.
‘He can’t be!’ Charlotte pushed away her untouched American-style pancakes that Nadia had made. ‘He confessed. Why would he confess if he didn’t do it? I’d never confess to murdering someone if I didn’t do it. It’s mental.’
‘He confessed to a crime he didn’t commit because he’s confused. Eat something, please. You’re not eating anything lately.’ Nadia pushed Charlotte’s plate back.
‘I’m not hungry. How can I eat at a time like this?’
‘Yeah,’ Anna again to me. ‘Why would he confess if he didn’t do it?’
How could I say that I now believed the only possible reason for Tom’s confession was because he was trying to protect someone? Because then I’d have to voice the horrible thought that was welling up inside, throbbing away like a nervy toothache. If Tom really was protecting his family like he’d told me, it meant one of us was the person who had really killed Katie. And t
he only thing I could be completely certain of was that it wasn’t me.
‘How can you be so stupid, Mum?’ Anna glared at me. ‘Of course he must’ve done it. And my friends will never speak to me again. Neither will my teachers. I don’t want to be here! I want to move!’
‘Now, just a minute! There’s no need to be rude,’ I snapped.
‘Oh, shut up!’ Anna yelled before she ran out of the room and stormed upstairs.
And so it started all over again. Lucas, back from a long-haul flight, hovered at the worktop, drinking coffee, staring out of the window and not offering anything remotely helpful to the conversation. Ethan had disappeared somewhere before I’d even woken up, probably on another one of his solitary walks. I left for work feeling like I’d done a day’s hard slog in a boot camp before I even got out the door.
It was a relief to be away from the house and the family as I took patients’ blood pressure, checked dressings and did blood glucose checks for the diabetic clinic. While I was working I could forget for a time and the morning passed quickly. After Elaine arrived to carry on the afternoon shift, I walked home to Tate Barn to put some washing on and get some new clothes for all of us.
This had to stop. We couldn’t carry on living at Nadia’s. Late last night Ethan had said he was going to move back into the barn at the weekend and go back to work on Monday. I didn’t want to split the family up, but I was dreading Anna’s reaction. She’d have nightmares, I knew it. Even I was having horrible, haunting dreams. What if she refused to come back here? What should I do then? Should I force her?
I noticed DI Spencer’s Mondeo parked on the road in front of our house but neither he nor DS Khan was sitting inside it. As I opened the gate I expected them to be checking something in the garage, but the door was closed and bolted from the outside, like always. Odd.
