A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  “Are you suggesting he killed her, too?”

  Parker shrugged. “Maybe she just left, but we have every reason to believe it was an unhappy, abusive home.”

  “That proves nothing.”

  “True. The hairs and the location of the van are what prove it.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” said Heather. Her face was growing hot, and she felt angry. Parker was suggesting she had been taken in by Reave, like those bizarre women who wrote letters to convicted killers and ended up marrying them. She thought of her mother, and her stomach rolled violently. “Ben, you have someone out there right now who seems to know an awful lot about the Red Wolf case. Who seems to know too much.”

  He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. “Listen, we appreciate your help. I appreciate it. I know it’s grim, sitting in that room with him.” He stopped, sighing suddenly. “We’ve found Miss Graham’s body.”

  “Oh.”

  Unable to stop herself, Heather thought of the photo she had given Parker, of the little grinning red head with the smudge of cream on her cheek. The idea that such a fate was waiting for her, a few years down the line, was unspeakable.

  “Was she … was it like the rest?”

  Parker shuffled his paperwork back into a pile, signaling that the conversation was over.

  “It’s best I don’t tell you about it, to be honest. You’ll come back? Try again?”

  “You don’t think it’s pointless then?”

  “I will take anything I can get at this point. We have to find this guy and stop him. Soon. Plus,” he glanced away, looking to see, she suspected, whether any colleagues were in earshot, “I’d like to see you again.”

  Heather grinned. “You know, there are other ways to ask someone out. Ways that don’t involve a third-wheel serial killer. Call me old fashioned.”

  DI Parker smiled ruefully at her. “Like I said, I take what I can get.”

  CHAPTER

  23

  HEATHER SAT CROSS-LEGGED on her mother’s sofa, the terracotta pot in her lap. She turned it around and around in her hands, her fingers occasionally brushing over the ragged heart-shaped scratch in the clay. Nikki was pouring more wine into their glasses as she sat on the floor.

  It was a heart. It was nothing. She could wander into any department store in London and find some sort of rustic crap emblazoned with hearts—coasters, toast racks, plates. Probably everyone had something with a heart on in their house, whether you were stylish or chintzy or utilitarian. They were weirdly hard to avoid.

  Yet.

  “My mum never liked this sort of thing, you know.”

  “What?” Nikki took a sip of her wine and raised an eyebrow. “Flower pots?”

  “Hearts.” Heather turned the pot around so she could see the scratched heart. “My dad was always so careful about what Valentine’s gifts he brought home for her. He always said she was fussy. But the more I think of it …” she frowned. “He gave her all sorts of presents, my dad, but never love-hearts and flowers. When it was her birthday, he’d get chocolates in her favorite flavors, candles that smelled of things like fresh laundry and sea breezes, jewelry and perfume and books. No teddies clutching hearts or massive bouquets of flowers.”

  “Okay,” said Nikki. “So what? Lots of people don’t do the whole Valentine’s thing. And would that have been so out of character for your mum? She never struck me as soppy, exactly.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. But …” Heather turned the pot over again, racking her memory. There had always been plants around the house when she was growing up, fat green plants with lustrous, shining leaves, the sort of plants that you could ignore most of the time without them dying. But flowers? Had Dad ever just brought home a bunch of tulips from the gas station? Sitting in her mother’s chintzy living room, the faint smell of coffee and air freshener in her nose, Heather thought not. “She didn’t like flowers, I’m almost sure of it. No daffodils in a vase on the table, no roses on Valentine’s Day. Nikki, what if flowers had bad associations for her? Perhaps she had looked at cut flowers, fresh blooms already dying, and had remembered that the man she had once spent so much time with—the man she was writing to in prison—had used flowers to decorate the corpses of his victims.”

  “You’re reading too much into it,” said Nikki, but she looked uncertain, all the same.

  “I don’t know if I am. Because there’s clearly loads of stuff about my mum I never had a clue about. It’s like I’m being shown a whole other side of her now.” Heather sighed. “Maybe I’ll find out more tomorrow.”

  “You’re going to see this Anna woman?”

  Heather nodded. She had phoned the number Pamela Whittaker had given her and spoken to the receptionist of the Twelve Elms Centre. Heather had sensed a fair amount of surprise from the woman that Anna had a visitor at all, but they had been eager enough to book her in.

  “She might have known my mum, so it’s worth a try.”

  Nikki swirled her wine in her glass thoughtfully. “Hev, do you really think Fiddler’s Mill is the key to all this? That something that happened so long ago could have caused your mother to … do this to herself?”

  “I do.” As soon as she said it out loud, she realized it was true. “I really do think something happened at this place, something mum kept secret for the rest of her life.”

  Heather stood up and left the living room, heading for the kitchen with the pot still in her arms. She was halfway across the tiled floor when a memory dropped into her mind like a blade of ice, and she jumped, the terracotta pot slipping from her arms. It shattered, scattering shards of orange clay all over her feet and sending pieces skittering under the fridge and the oven, but Heather hardly noticed.

  The card.

  “Heather?” Nikki appeared at the kitchen door, her eyes wide. “Are you all right?”

  It had been left outside their door when Heather was thirteen or fourteen. She had found it as she’d stepped out to nip to the shops, and she remembered the weird combined feeling of embarrassment and pleasure as she’d knelt to pick it up. At the time, she had been nursing a crush on a boy called James Thurlow, who was in her science classes, and thanks to a wild combination of hormones and optimism she had been dropping huge hints about Valentine’s Day for the last few weeks. The card itself had been quite a classy one; simple white background traced with gold lines, a big red heart in the middle. Inside, somewhat disappointingly, there were just the printed words “always thinking of you” with a heart hand drawn in ballpoint pen underneath.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Nikki took her hand and squeezed it, and with some difficulty Heather dragged herself back to the present.

  When I was a teenager, someone left a Valentine’s card on our doorstep. I thought it was for me, but … Mum saw me pick it up, and Nikki, she went batshit.”

  Her mother had grabbed her by the shoulder, yanking her back into the hallway and slamming the door shut. Her face had been so pale, and Heather could clearly picture the dark smudges that had appeared under her eyes, almost like bruises.

  “She yanked the card out of my hands and she tore it up, just like that. When I shouted at her, said that it was mine, she had asked me if it had been addressed to me, and it hadn’t, but you know, I was a kid, it never occurred to me that anyone could have been sending my mum a Valentine’s card. She was old, and married, and to kids that basically means dead, right? But …” Heather looked at the shards of the pot littering the floor. “When she was done shouting at me, she started crying. Locked herself in the bathroom. We never spoke of it again.”

  “What do you think it means?’”

  “I don’t know.” Heather rubbed her hands over her face. They smelt like the dirt that had been inside the pot. “Probably nothing. Come on, I can’t be bothered to clean this up now. Let’s go and finish our wine.”

  Heather watched Nikki walk back into the living room. It was cold, too cold. She rubbed vigorously at her arms, and a violent s
hiver worked its way down her spine.

  The card didn’t mean anything, except that her mother was paranoid about something, even at a time when Michael Reave himself had certainly been in prison, and in no position to leave cards on doorsteps—unless there was someone on the outside, performing little tasks for him. Tasks like romantic gestures. And murder.

  Heather kicked one of the bigger shards of pot under the fridge, and went to join her friend.

  CHAPTER

  24

  THE TWELVE ELMS Centre was a pleasingly gothic building, with white windowsills shining against dark gray brick, and all the more imposing under a sky filled with rain clouds. Heather walked up the path through the gardens, noting that they were well kept and neat, while the sign outside the building was narrow and discreet: Twelve Elms Centre for the Treatment of Anxiety Disorders and Trauma. Inside a cozy reception area she spoke to a sturdy looking man with kind eyes, who shortly introduced her to Doctor Parvez.

  “You’re here to visit Anna Hobson?”

  Dr Parvez was a tall willowy man with an advancing bald patch and large, old-fashioned glasses. He wore a beige cardigan that was both too long and too big for him, making him look a little like an absent-minded grandma.

  Heather smiled. “Yeah, a favor for my friend Pamela. She used to visit quite often, I think, but has been rushed off her feet lately. You’ve probably met her?”

  “Ms. Whittaker, yes. Well, thank you for taking the time. Anna doesn’t get many visitors, and they really do help. News from the real world always goes down a storm.”

  He led her down a series of pleasant corridors, all smelling faintly of disinfectant and floor polish. Heather caught sight of a few people here and there; a young man with an old- fashioned haircut reading a newspaper, an older lady sitting in an armchair, rubbing her hands together over and over.

  “Did Ms. Whittaker tell you much about Anna?”

  “Not so much. Only that she’s been through a tough time.”

  Dr Parvez nodded seriously. “She has, at that. She might lose her train of thought a little, but generally Anna is delightful company. Here you go.”

  He stopped at the doorway to a wide, spacious room, tastefully decorated in magnolia and a faint, anemic pink. There were several tables, each set with pairs of chairs, and a handful of people talking quietly. The tall windows looked out across the gardens. Despite the pleasantness of the surroundings, Heather found herself thinking about her visits to Belmarsh to see Michael Reave.

  “The people here,” she said suddenly. “They don’t have … a history of violence or anything, do they?”

  A flicker of annoyance passed over Dr Parvez’s face, and Heather immediately regretted asking.

  “We treat a variety of problems here, Miss Evans—depression, anxiety, various personality disorders—and one of the few things they all have in common is that the patients are much more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else. Shall I introduce you to Anna?”

  He took her over to a table in the far corner. Sitting there was a tired looking woman with lank, brown hair and a deeply creased face. Heather found she could not guess at how old she was; she seemed all ages at once. She was wearing a soft hooded top and a T-shirt, and she looked up at Heather with watery eyes.

  “Good morning, Anna,” said Dr Parvez, brightly enough. “Pamela sent someone to have a chat with you. Are you feeling up to it today?”

  Anna’s eyes wandered back over to the doctor, as if seeing him for the first time, and then she nodded slowly.

  “Great.” Dr Parvez turned to Heather and smiled. “I’ll get someone to bring you both a cup of tea.”

  Heather seated herself at the table. She felt slightly foolish. What was she supposed to say to this woman? A soft murmur from the corner of the room revealed a television set no one was watching.

  “Hi Anna, how are you? I’m Heather Evans. Pamela said I should come and have a chat. Would you like that?” Heather cringed inwardly at the patronizing tone in her own voice. It was because the place felt like an old people’s home; she half expected to have to raise her voice, or avoid talking about politics. The woman sighed heavily.

  “A chat. Yeah. That would be good,” she shifted in the chair, bringing her arms up around her chest briefly, as though hugging herself, and then dropped them again. “It’s very boring here,” she said, some animation coming into her eyes. “Not much to do. I’m allowed to go for a wander, usually, but I got into trouble last time.”

  “How come? What happened?”

  Anna shrugged and looked away, a slightly shifty expression moving over her features, when a short young woman came over with two polystyrene cups of tea for them. Heather thanked her, and she moved to the far side of the room, where an old man was playing checkers by himself.

  “So. This seems like a nice place. How did you end up here?”

  “Referrals, one place to another, that’s me. They said I have mild paranoid schizophrenia,” she pronounced it carefully, as though reading it off a card in her head. “With long-term delusions, occasional hallucinations.” Then, as an afterthought, “probably exacerbated by drink and drug abuse.”

  “That’s a lot to deal with.”

  “You’re telling me.” With this out of the way, Anna seemed to brighten a bit. “It’s hard, and I take so many pills I rattle, but this is a nice place. Better than others. Pam sent you, did she?”

  “Yeah. I chatted to her about her art work, and she helped me out, so I said I’d come and talk to you.” She cleared her throat. “She says she’s sorry she hasn’t been lately.”

  Anna shrugged again. “Poor Pam, she worries a lot. She thinks a lot of this is her fault, when it’s not. It’s just the way my brain is made, but she … she finds it hard to see me when I’m going through a bad patch.”

  “Why would Pam think your problems are her fault?”

  Again, Anna seemed reluctant to answer. Instead, she took a sip of her tea, grimacing as she swallowed. “Christ, this stuff tastes like piss. That’s the worst thing about being in these places, I think. The bloody tea. There’s no tea quite like the stuff you make yourself at home, is there?” As she put the cup back down, Heather got a glance at the top of her forearm; she only saw it for a second, but there was a tangled knot of scar tissue there, white against the woman’s heavily freckled skin. It was roughly heart-shaped.

  Heather forced a smile onto her lips even as her stomach turned over. “You’re definitely right there. So how do you know Pam?”

  “We met when I was a girl really, travelling round Europe, getting into all the wrong things.” She grinned briefly, revealing at least one tooth that had turned black. “She was older than me, so I followed her for a bit, and we ended up at this commune place in Lancashire. She loved it at first, Pam did.”

  “The commune?”

  “Oh yeah. All that nature stuff, she loved it. She was one of those real committed hippies, you know?” Anna smiled, although it looked pained now. “I was there for the drugs, mostly. They had some good shit there.”

  “Fiddler’s Mill.” Heather said it carefully, somehow convinced that the name would upset the woman, but she didn’t show any particular reaction. “Pam mentioned the place. Said that you had a hard time there.”

  The unspoken question hung in the air for a moment. Anna lifted her arms again in the slight, almost hugging motion, then laid her hands on her stomach instead.

  “There were some bad people. Good drugs, bad people. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I … I had some fun there. It’s a strange place, that bit of the countryside. I grew up in a flat on a council estate and the closest we got to green stuff was the scrubby grass in the swing park but that place … there’s so much of it. You go out there and stand in the middle of the woods, it’s like it could be any time. Like, a hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, I don’t know. Maybe even before people were around, you know? That sort of place. So quiet, so lonely.” She shrugged. “I got lonely there, I made
myself less lonely. That’s how drugs work sometimes—they make it easy not to be lonely.”

  “A lot of free love?”

  Anna smiled wanly, although there was an expression about her eyes that worried Heather. She glanced around and saw a portly nurse come into the room, the first person she had seen in any sort of uniform. The woman paused at a table to pick up an empty cup.

  “Not sure free is a good word for it. Certainly bloody costly to me. But yeah, I suppose.”

  “Anna, while you were there, did you know a woman called Colleen?”

  Heather pulled an old photograph from her satchel and laid it on the table between them. It was a photo of her mother at a birthday party, standing next to a cake covered in unlit candles. Heather guessed she was in her late-twenties at the time, and she looked, as she did in all photos, slightly uneasy. The tops of her cheeks were flushed pink.

  “Colleen?” Anna was peering at the photograph.

  “Yeah. She might have been at Fiddler’s Mill at the same time as you. Do you recognize her at all?”

  “Why? Why are you asking about this?” Anna looked confused. She touched her fingers to the photograph and then brought them away quickly, as though it had burned her. “I thought you were a friend of Pam’s?”

  “Oh, just curious. It turns out I knew someone who went there, too. Weird coincidence, isn’t it?” Heather smiled, watching Anna’s face for any sign of recognition, but there was only bafflement.

  “There were lots of girls there,” Anna said eventually. “And a lot of drugs. I don’t know. It’s a miracle I remember Pamela, to be honest.” But as she turned away from the photo, Heather thought she saw another expression in the set of her eyes, and the corners of her mouth; guilt.

  Heather picked up the photograph and put it back into her satchel.

  “Was there other stuff going on, Anna? Weird stuff, I mean.” For a second she considered asking about the scars on her arm, but Anna had turned her chin up to the ceiling and narrowed her eyes, as if looking up at a bright summer sky.