by Sibel Hodge
‘But Katie’s in there.’
‘She’s not, darling.’ I pressed my fingertips to my eyelids, trying to keep the tears inside. If I started, I didn’t think I’d be able to stop. I dropped my hands and took hold of hers. ‘The police took her away. There’s nothing left. She’s not there.’
‘Her ghost is still there.’
‘Darling, we’ve had this conversation.’
‘I don’t care – it’s still there!’ She stamped her foot. I felt like doing the same. If only it would solve everything. ‘And Granddad killed her!’ she yelled the last part at me. I glanced around to see if anyone had overheard, then thought What did it matter? Everyone in the village probably knew by now, anyway.
‘We’re not going to be there for long – just until we can sell it, like I said. And we don’t know that Granddad did have anything to do with her death yet.’ I tried to hold on to that thought, like I’d been trying to all this time, and yet I was still struggling with it. ‘It might’ve been an accident for all we know,’ I said lamely. ‘In the meantime, we have to leave them all be and let them get through this traumatic time as best they can. We can visit Charlotte whenever she wants to see us, but we can’t stay in their house. It’s not fair of us to burden them with how we’re feeling when they have to cope with her illness.’
She sullenly stared down, kicking at pebbles with her feet. ‘Can I go with her for her treatment? Hold her hand and keep her company?’
‘If she wants you to, darling, of course you can. I think that would be a very brave and loving thing for you to do. Concentrating on helping her get through this will give you strength to deal with it, too.’
She pulled at her lip with her thumb and forefinger, thinking about that for a few moments, and then nodded. ‘OK. I’m going to be the best cousin I can so I can help her, and I need to be grown up to do that, don’t I?’
‘You do indeed.’ I smiled with relief and looked up at the sky, blinking rapidly to clear my blurring vision. I hugged her towards me, feeling an overwhelming rush of pride. ‘You’re a good girl, darling. I’m very proud of you.’
‘But can I sleep with you tonight? I don’t want to be alone in my own bedroom. I might have a bad dream thinking about Katie and Charlotte and everything.’ She looked at me, lost and forlorn.
‘Of course you can.’ I gripped her hand as tight as I could without hurting her.
‘And can Poppy sleep with us, too? She’ll help chase the ghosts away.’
‘Yes.’
Poppy sat down and barked at us, knowing we were talking about her.
‘She wants her dinner,’ I said.
My stomach rumbled and I realised it was way past our dinner time, too. I thought about the meal Nadia would’ve been cooking when she got the call from Doctor Palmer, which would sit there untouched now. You always take life for granted, don’t you? You think you’ve got years and years ahead of you so you plan all this stuff you’re going to do in the future. I wonder how much time we waste being unhappy, doing things we don’t want to, never fulfilling ourselves, because we think there’s all this time left when we’ll finally get round to doing what we want. Except there isn’t. Life can change in a split second. It can all go wrong in one shattered moment. And then it’s too late to do the things we put off. Too late to live the dreams we’ve been dreaming of all this time. It was too late for Katie and it could be too late for Charlotte. We had to do everything in our power to make things as wonderful for Charlotte as possible while we still could. While she still could appreciate life.
‘I’m hungry, too,’ Anna said. ‘Nadia was making Thai green curry and apple sesame fritters for pudding.’
I squeezed her hand, wondering what the hell I still had left in the kitchen cupboards that I could feed her. ‘Well, I could probably rustle up a Chinese or something.’
‘You’re going to cook a Chinese? What, from scratch?’ she said disbelievingly.
‘No. But the Peking Kitchen will, and as a bonus they’ll even deliver it. Are you ready to go home?’
She looked at me. ‘Will you make me waffles for breakfast with ice cream and chocolate sauce?’
Oh, to be twelve again, where the lowest lows are followed by an overdose of ice cream and chocolate. Anything sugary, in fact. Roll on a few years and the ice cream is replaced by wine. Which reminded me, did we have any in the house? It was going to take a hell of a lot to make me sleep tonight.
I forced a smile. ‘Absolutely.’
‘You promise?’
I held up my little finger. ‘I pinky swear my promise.’
She entwined her little finger with mine and gave me a brave smile.
When we got home the sky was turning to dusk. Ethan’s car still wasn’t there. Anna stuck close by me, walking stiffly up the front steps, pointedly avoiding looking at the garage.
I took her hand and led her into the house, flipping on the lights as we went. She followed me into the kitchen and bumped into the back of me when I stopped walking. My Klingon had returned.
‘Do you want a drink?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, wine.’
I actually laughed at her joke. I don’t know where it came from. I was probably hysterical. Or having a breakdown. No, I actually think it was a way to get rid of all the nervous tension and worry and stress that had built up like a pressure cooker, waiting to explode. It had to go somewhere, I guess. I laughed and laughed and couldn’t stop. Then Anna was laughing, too, until tears streamed down her cheeks. I clutched my stomach, bent over double and howled. We were making so much noise that I didn’t hear Ethan coming in. It wasn’t until I saw him hovering in the kitchen doorway that my laughter faded to a dull tinkle.
He looked at us both with a confused, pinched frown. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘Charlotte’s got leukaemia,’ Anna and I said in unison.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I needed to stay busy. I wanted something to take my mind off Charlotte, and going to work would’ve been the best solution, but leaving Anna at home on her own in a house she was scared of while dealing with Charlotte’s leukaemia was out of the question. Luckily, the practice arranged for a locum nurse to come in and take over my shift for the next week.
I slipped out of bed, unable to sleep, just as it was getting light the following morning. Ethan was in Anna’s bed because she was in with me, but I didn’t want to wake him. He’d taken the news about Charlotte really badly on top of everything else. He’d cried. A lot. Head in his hands, shoulder-shaking sobs, I’m talking about. He was trying to be strong for us, I knew that. But inside he wasn’t dealing with things well. It felt like all of us were falling apart.
How did you get through something like this? Tom’s confession. His suicide. Katie’s murder. Her pregnancy. Charlotte’s illness. The secrets and lies and unanswered questions.
One step at a time. That’s how we’d get through it. One tiny step at a time. We’d be all right. We had to be. Had to.
I walked into the kitchen, dug the waffle maker out of the cupboard and switched it on to heat up. Nothing happened. I flipped the switch a few times, waiting for the light to come on but it didn’t make any difference. There wasn’t a power cut because the fridge was still on. The fuse had blown, then. Well, I wasn’t about to ask Ethan to replace it like he normally did, not at the moment with all he had on his mind, but I couldn’t go back on my promise to Anna. Not now I’d managed to get her back here. Although I didn’t really want to venture into the garage, either, where I knew Ethan’s toolbox was kept.
My gaze flicked out of the window to the garage. I’d have to go in there sometime. I was being pathetic. Katie wasn’t there. Her ghost wasn’t there. I had to get this over with and face my fears.
Plus, I hate to admit it, but a little morbid part of me was curious.
I unlocked the back door and squeezed my fee
t into a pair of Anna’s ballet-style flats that were two sizes too small. It was only about six metres to the garage door but it felt like two miles, as if I was walking down some kind of Alice-through-the-looking-glass tunnel and the closer I got the further away it seemed.
I stood outside it, my pulse hammering hard against the base of my throat. I undid the bolt and slowly pulled opened the door. The wood creaked, sounding like a painful, high-pitched cry, which made my hand drop abruptly to my side with a slap.
I pressed my other hand to my chest and took some deep breaths. The morning sun streamed through the double window on the opposite side of the garage, illuminating the scene. Along the wall to my left were shelves full of Ethan’s tools and odds and sods. Sanders, drills, half-used tins of paint, boxes full of old leads and adaptors, dust sheets and rags. The bottom shelf was used as a workbench with a vice attached. Leaning against the opposite wall were ladders, fold-up chairs, a couple of sun loungers, Tom’s old ping pong table, Ethan’s and Anna’s bikes, and probably a load of old junk we should really take to the rubbish tip. We’d have to sort that out before we moved.
In the centre of the concrete floor was a big, gaping hole that went down into the earth like an open wound. A hollowness opened up in my chest and I found it hard to breathe. This was my best friend’s grave.
Was it really an accident or had it been planned? Had she begged for her life, or was she unconscious when she was killed? Was she trying to save herself and her baby? Did she fight back? Scream?
I made an involuntary noise that sounded like a cross between a sob and a squeak.
My poor, poor friend.
Anxious to get out of there, I rushed towards the bench where I saw Ethan’s toolbox. It was metal with two upper compartments that were double hinged on each side and rotated outwards to expose the main tool storage underneath. The upper compartments were already open and I could see some tools in the bottom section, so I searched for a screwdriver to poke in the fuse cover on the waffle maker’s plug. Next, I picked out a hammer and pliers and a whole messy, tangled heap of cable-ties, spanners and screws, looking for the small yellow plastic box with spare fuses inside that I knew he kept in there. I rummaged around, my fingers poking into the corners, and that’s when I found it.
The discovery hit me like a knife being plunged between my shoulder blades. My heart lurched into my throat and the hairs on the back of my neck prickled. I had a thought then that maybe it really was all my fault. I’d wanted something to take my mind off Charlotte, and didn’t they always say to be careful what you wished for?
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I sat at the island in the kitchen, the room silent apart from the ticking of the clock. On the worktop in front of me was a silver necklace. The chain was a flat curb-link pattern. Pretty ordinary and nondescript, really. Nothing strange about it at all. The strange thing was the charm on the end of it. A sun with wavy rays fanning out in a circle around it. Underneath the sun dangled a smaller star with a clear sparkling stone in the centre, probably cubic zirconium or something like that. On the back of the sun was inscribed You’re my sun and stars. I’d never seen it before in my life but I was pretty sure I knew what it was. Chris had described it as a necklace with a sun and a star when he’d told me what Katie had worn on the Sunday she was running away from home.
So, the big question was, what was my husband doing with it? Or, more accurately, what the HELL was my husband doing with it?
I stroked the silver chain, which was tarnished with age, wishing it could tell me a story. Was it really the same one, or was it something that just looked similar? How many necklaces were there in the world with a sun and a star on them? Millions, probably. But how many people were wearing one on the day they disappeared and ended up buried in the very place I’d found it?
Still, it could all be a strange coincidence, couldn’t it? Just a very odd . . .
Odd what?
Odd coincidence.
Yeah, you said that already. It didn’t sound any more plausible the first time. Repeating it won’t make it more believable.
Had Ethan killed Katie? Was it his baby? He’d said she’d tried to sleep with him; what if he had? What if he hadn’t turned her down, after all? What if she’d threatened to tell me about it and he killed her? Was she trying to blackmail him? Had Tom covered it up?
How do you know it’s even the same necklace?
I didn’t know, of course, but I had to find out for sure.
Before I could think any more about it, I heard a creak at the top of the stairs. I brushed the necklace into my palm and put it in the kitchen drawer we used for takeaway menus and other crap that we didn’t know where to put.
When Ethan came into the kitchen I had my back to him, furiously poking the screwdriver into the fuse cover on the back of the plug to pop it open.
‘Morning,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Fuse has gone.’ My hand shook and I tried to keep my voice light, but it came out sounding sing-songy, as if it was a line from a musical.
‘Want me to do that?’ He put a hand on mine and I dropped the fuse.
‘Sorry, that was my fault,’ he said.
We both bent down at the same time and our heads banged together.
‘Ouch!’ My vision wavered with black and white pinpricks and I rubbed my forehead.
‘Sorry.’ He put a hand to his own forehead and attempted a smile.
I picked up the fuse, head throbbing.
He gripped my arm and I froze. ‘I’m sorry I’ve been so distant and angry. I . . . this is all really hard. I just . . .’ He squeezed my arm hard as his gaze drifted out through the window towards the garage.
‘That hurts!’ I jerked my arm away.
‘Sorry.’ He ran a hand through his hair. ‘Jesus, sorry. Look, I’m just trying to apologise for how I’ve been acting.’ He crushed me in an embrace, squeezing me to him as if I was his oxygen.
I fought the urge to recoil and confront him about the necklace, but I couldn’t say anything. Not yet. I needed to be sure it was definitely the same one before I did that. I didn’t think it would go down too well, accusing your husband of murder if he hadn’t even done anything. Would you ever get the trust back again? Things were dicey enough between us at the moment as it was.
I rested my clammy palms on his broad back, trying to keep my breathing steady. Is this what he’d done with Katie? Hugged her? Kissed her? Fucked her? Killed her?
‘This has just knocked me for six,’ he said.
‘Well, you were very close to Tom; it’s understandable. It’s difficult for everyone.’
‘And now with Charlotte being ill. It’s like someone’s got it in for us.’
Or it’s reparation for everything this family’s done. Payback time.
‘Do you think she’s going to survive?’
I took a deep breath and pulled back. ‘We have to think positively. For Charlotte and Nadia and Lucas. It’s going to be a long, hard struggle for all of them.’
‘Yeah.’ He looked at me and blinked, his eyes shining. He sniffed and stood up straighter. ‘Look, I’m not going to be all distant anymore. I’m here for you, OK? And Anna. My girls are the most important thing in the world, and I’m sorry I’ve been acting so angry. I’m sorry I’ve been blaming you.’
‘You’re in mourning,’ I said, unable to look at him. ‘It’s natural to be all over the place.’
He took the fuse from my curled fist. ‘Here, I’ll do that.’ He kissed me on the cheek and I fought the urge to shudder. ‘I’ve got a planning meeting this morning and some other things to finalise but I’ll try and get home early tonight. Maybe we can all go out for dinner or something. Save you worrying about cooking.’
‘I don’t really feel like going out at the moment. I want to know what happens with Charlotte at the hospital.’ I watched him
screwing the plug back together, wondering if those same hands had killed Katie.
‘OK. Whatever you want.’
What I want is to find the truth. What did you do, Ethan? What did you do?
As soon as he left for work I called DI Spencer and asked if they had any more leads with the investigation.
‘Unfortunately not.’ He sounded tired, too. ‘Because it happened such a long time ago, we don’t have many witnesses who actually remember anything. The enquiries we’ve made have led to no new sightings of Katie on the day she apparently disappeared. I checked with the employees who were working on the barn conversion at the time. There was one labourer helping Tom on site who remembered that when he finished work on Saturday afternoon, the foundations for the garage had been dug out and the sub-base, insulation and rebar were completed, but the concrete lorry wasn’t booked to pour the garage floor for another week or so. He was surprised when he came back to work on the Monday and Tom suddenly wanted a rush job on the flooring and a lorry was already on site laying the concrete for it.’
Again, I pictured Tom stuffing Katie’s lifeless body into that hole. Her head flopping back as he dropped her down into the cold dirt and covered her up with earth and concrete. My stomach twisted violently.
‘At this stage we’ve found no evidence to suggest that someone other than Tom was responsible for her death and for burying her in the garage. Unless we find anything to contradict that theory, the case will be closed. We can’t prosecute someone who’s now deceased.’
‘Um . . . I just wondered . . . when you found her . . . was there anything with her?’
