A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  “I know what you mean. And I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Cathy nodded briefly, trying to gather herself. The cold tone from the other woman was throwing her.

  “Before she died, she told me I was adopted. It was a bit of a shock, to put it lightly. I never had the slightest inkling.” She paused and took a gulp of her wine. “She also told me it was a private adoption, no official records or anything, which was partly why they never told me. It all seemed mad to me. Still does.”

  “It goes on more than you think.” Jane Bailey had crossed her legs, and was leaning forward over her knee, although she was looking at some point beyond Cathy. “Especially then.”

  “She gave me the name of the woman who had arranged it, and … well, she took a lot of finding, is the short version of the story. When I found her, she did not want to talk to me at all. Like, at all. It was only when I threatened to get the police involved … and I’m not proud of that.”

  Jane Bailey sat up, the color dropping from her face.

  “You did what?”

  “Nothing! Nothing came of that at all, I was just desperate. I wanted to know who you were. And she did tell me. So, I thought …”

  “Look. Cathy. What do you want from me?” Her mother put her wine glass down on the table, and Cathy couldn’t help noticing her fingers were trembling.

  “What do I want? What do you think I want?” Cathy gritted her teeth, forced herself to slow down. None of this was going how she’d expected. “I want some idea why. I wanted to know who you were, and why you didn’t want me. I guess that’s the heart of it.”

  For a minute or so there was a silence between them. The television in the corner of the pub was playing a news report, black bars of subtitles flicking up and away before it was possible to make sense of them. The radio was playing some old ’80s song that Cathy couldn’t quite place.

  “Cathy …” Her mother took a deep, slightly shaky breath. “I don’t have the answers for you, I’m afraid. When I had you, I was young. Too young. And I was … unwell. I barely knew what I was doing back then, and it’s not a time in my life I like to even think about, let alone talk about. And especially to a stranger. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but that’s who you are to me.”

  “What about my real father? Are you still with him? Can you tell me who that is?”

  Jane Bailey looked down at her hands, her sallow cheeks suddenly flushed with color.

  “No, I can’t tell you that. I don’t know. Listen, this isn’t a good idea for either of us, all right? I think it’s best if —”

  “You have grandchildren! Don’t you even want to know about them?” Cathy pulled her phone out and with a couple of presses summoned pictures of Harry and Rosie—she passed it across the table and then when Jane didn’t take it, flicked through the pictures herself. There were images of Harry’s third birthday, when he’d had a cake in the shape of a truck; photos of Rosie at the park, her wellies splattered with mud. She came to baby photos of the both of them, looking nearly identical with their tiny screwed up pink faces. At these Jane looked pained. She reached behind her and picked up her coat.

  “What are you—?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do this. Don’t contact me again.” She shrugged on her coat in a series of jerky movements, and picked up her handbag. “I mean it. Finish off the wine if you like, it’s paid for.”

  With that she was gone.

  * * *

  Later, after a brief crying spell on a bus and a visit to the supermarket toilets to clean up her face, Cathy walked up her own road, feeling marginally better. So, that hadn’t gone how she had hoped it would. There had been no tearful reunion, no sense of two families coming together—just an older woman who felt like she was having her privacy invaded. As David had pointed out beforehand, all the important things were still there in her life; Harry and Rosie, their lives together, and her memories of her own mum and dad.

  I’ll get over it, she told herself. Jane Bailey isn’t worth the trouble, it turns out.

  The lights were on in the living room, throwing yellow light onto the front lawn. It revealed a pair of scooters—pink and purple in daylight, but gray and orange in the shadows. Harry and Rosie were angels in many respects, but they did have a somewhat casual attitude to tidying up after themselves. Smiling to herself, Cathy picked up a scooter in each hand and instead of going to the front door, went to the side gate—always open when someone was home—and went around to the back garden. The lights weren’t on in the kitchen, so the long and narrow garden was thick with shadows, and she could barely make out the shed at the very bottom. Still, she knew it well enough to get there in the dark.

  “All right, from tomorrow, they put these away after themselves or I lock them in here for good.” Cathy dropped the scooters and opened the shed door. There was a smell, bad enough that she instinctively covered her nose. “Christ. Something died in here.” With one hand she felt around for the light switch, but when she flicked it, nothing happened.

  Sod it. This is a job for Dave. I keep telling him to clear this place out.

  The idea of putting the scooters in the shed with something rotting was repulsive. Rubbing her hands on the front of her coat, Cathy turned to go, but not before she heard something—a small intake of breath, a sniff from someone suddenly very close. A shudder moved through her whole body.

  “Who —?”

  Something leapt at her from the dark, and Cathy went down hard, smacking the back of her head against the small gravel path. The night sky lit up with multicolored stars, before they were blacked out by a shape leaning over her. Hard, strong hands closed around her neck.

  “I’m here now.” The voice in her ear was soft, almost friendly. “I’m here to take you home.”

  Cathy squirmed, trying to throw the stranger off, but every movement summoned a bright flower of pain from the back of her head. Desperately, she turned her head away from her attacker, looking back at the house. Someone upstairs had turned a light on. She willed them to open the curtains. Look out the window. Look out the window.

  “I am home,” she croaked. “This is my home …”

  CHAPTER

  31

  IT WAS LATE, and cold, and raining.

  The police station existed in its own little oasis of light. Heather stood in the car park with her biggest coat on, her hood up against the persistent wet, and tried not to feel like a criminal.

  She knew he was in the station. She also knew, logically, that he would have to come out to his car eventually, but as the hours passed by this piece of reasoning looked shakier and shakier. Perhaps he was pulling an all-nighter, perhaps the case had broken in some way and he’d already left, slipping out and leaving in a police car when she was looking in the wrong direction. Yet, every time she thought about giving up and leaving, she remembered their night in the kitchen, and the shape and the warm weight of him in the dark. She thought of how he brought her wine and laughed at her terrible jokes over Chinese food.

  “There might not be anything left to salvage,” she murmured to herself, her hands thrust deep inside her pockets. “But I at least owe him a proper apology.”

  To her own mild dismay, she recognized his silhouette as soon as he appeared at the big double doors. He paused there, in conversation with a colleague, then came down the steps, pulling his coat collar up against the cold. As he came to his car, Heather stepped out of the shadows.

  “Hey.”

  He stopped, his shoulders dropping, before glancing back toward the well-lit station.

  “Heather, I can’t really talk to you right now.” He sighed. “And it’s pissing down out here. Have you been waiting all night?”

  “Listen, I just wanted to say sorry properly, okay? Explain myself a bit maybe.” She pulled her hood down, ignoring the fat drops of freezing rain that immediately began dribbling down the back of her neck.

  “You mean, see what else you can wring out of me for your article?”

 
She winced, the guilt in her stomach gaining weight.

  “I deserve that, I know. I just want a couple of minutes. Then you can tell me to piss off, I promise.”

  He sighed and pulled a key fob from his pocket. The car blinked into life.

  “Get in.”

  He didn’t look at her once they were in the car. It was as untidy as it had been the last time, a crumpled-up McDonald’s wrapper in the footwell.

  “I’ll drive you back to your mum’s,” he said, his voice terse. “You really shouldn’t have come here today.”

  “No, listen, I don’t want to go there. Can we go somewhere else?” Heather rubbed her hands over her face. “You don’t owe me anything at this point, obviously, but I really can’t face that place at the moment. Is there somewhere else we can go?”

  For a long time he didn’t say anything at all, but as they drove Heather gradually realized that they weren’t driving toward Balesford. Instead they were heading east, toward Hoxton way, and she bit down several caustic comments about hipsters and man buns. Eventually, they drew up outside a smart block of new build flats, a few doors down from a 24-hour bagel shop. Ben took his hands off the wheel, and spoke, still not looking at her.

  “This is my place. If you want, you can come in for ten minutes, say whatever it is you need to say. You can have a cup of tea, or coffee, if I have any. And then I’ll drive you back, and that has to be the end of it. Okay?”

  “It’s more than I deserve.” She smiled at him hesitantly, but he didn’t return it.

  Inside, the flat was tiny and about as untidy as his car, but in Heather’s eyes it was the good kind of untidy: books strewn all over the place, papers stacked randomly on corners, empty coffee cups left abandoned like beacons on every surface. The living room shared space with an open kitchen, and there were lots of interesting food gadgets crammed on the sideboard—this was a man who enjoyed cooking. Heather felt another pang of regret. I’ve really fucked up here. He’s perfect.

  “Tea? Coffee?”

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  He shrugged off his coat and chucked it on the sofa. Heather didn’t bother taking hers off. After a couple of minutes, he handed her a steaming mug of tea, which she curled her fingers around gratefully.

  “So. Right.” She sipped at the tea even though it was too hot. Parker leaned against the kitchen top, his own tea untouched. “You know this wasn’t some big scheme, okay? Yes, I did go to my old editor and tell her that I might have a story she would be interested in, but I told her I wanted full control over it, that I wanted to write it once this bastard was caught. I’d never have willingly put the investigation back in any way. Diane fucked me over, printed what I’d told her without my permission. And what happened the other night …”

  “I asked you what you did for a living,” said Parker, evenly. “And you told me you were a writer.”

  “Which isn’t untrue.”

  He half laughed and shook his head, but there was no humor in it at all. Heather felt her heart sink.

  “I suppose that makes it okay then. I know what happened at your old job, too.” He looked at her, his hazel eyes steady. “I should have looked more closely at your background before now, of course, but I’ve had a lot on my plate.”

  She steadied herself against a kitchen stool. “What happened at the newspaper … You don’t know how I was provoked.”

  “I guess not.”

  “I got into a fight with a colleague.”

  “A fight normally suggests two people attempting to do physical harm to each other.”

  “Do you have any idea how much you sound like a police officer sometimes?” Heather sighed. “Look, journalism is still crawling with the sort of men who are in shock that women have ventured out of the kitchens. It was, you know, a fractious environment.”

  Parker said nothing.

  “There was this man, his name was Tristan. We were covering one of those stories, a model claiming she had been assaulted by a football player, and Tristan was all over it—raving on about what a gold-digger she was, how the man’s career was ruined, blah blah. He said she was losing her looks, of course she was going to pull this. How else would she get column inches?”

  “Right.” Parker had put his tea down. As far as she could tell, he still hadn’t touched it.

  “He was always saying shit like that, usually to get a reaction from me, and, idiot that I am, I almost always rose to it. This time I told him I’d call him a cunt, except he didn’t have the warmth or depth.”

  Parker turned his head away, but not before she caught the half smile on his face.

  “Well. He came over to my desk and leaned on it, smirking. He opened his mouth to say something else and … I just lost it.”

  Heather paused, looking down at her mug of tea.

  “You don’t have to tell me any of this, you know.”

  “Yeah, well. Maybe I do.” Heather took a sip of tea, remembering. “You have to put up with a lot of shit in that job, it’s the only way to survive it. I hate that term “being one of the lads” but that’s part of it—pretending you’re not bothered by their crap, that it could never reach you or make you react. But just then, it all boiled up. How unfair it was that this little prick stain could strut about saying whatever he liked and I just had to eat it all up, and that no one would ever tell him he couldn’t do it. I … I picked up my pen and I rammed it through his hand into the table.”

  Parker cleared his throat.

  “It was pretty bad. Blood everywhere. He screamed blue murder, and while he did, I threw my hot coffee in his face.” She looked away from Ben, not wanting to see the expression on his face just then. She didn’t mention the shroud of cold that had settled over her just before she’d done it, or the pure, beautiful sensation that this little man did not matter, and that she could hurt him if she wanted to—the pleasure his pain had brought her. She did not mention the satisfaction of hearing him holler, or how the sight of his blood on her desk had pleased her. The image of it was still very vivid. “All hell broke loose, of course. Ultimately, though, I just got the sack. I could have made it very difficult for them, you see. Bringing up institutionalized sexism in the current climate would have gone down like a giant sack of shit, so they talked him into not pressing charges and I just left.”

  Outside, an ambulance wailed its way down the road, throwing up a brief flash of blue light across rain spattered windows.

  “Listen, Ben, I’m a shit person, okay? I’m a mess, always have been. God,” she swallowed past the bitter laughter that was bubbling up her throat. “Yeah, I wanted to get my career back, I wanted to try and understand a serial killer, maybe stop something dreadful from happening, but I can also stand here and say, yes, I also wanted you, and I didn’t make that up. I was glad you turned up on my doorstep, and I’m not sorry you ended up in my bed.” She looked down into her tea, furious that she was suddenly close to crying. “That night was the only bright spot in what has been a pretty hideous fucking month.”

  “Heather,” Ben took a step toward her and then stopped, seeming to think better of it. “Heather, this taints the investigation. It’s not like I’m investigating some shoplifting here, or tax evasion. People are dying. And I’ve been led down the garden path by someone who was looking for information, for juicy details that she can use to spice up a newspaper article. I have a duty to the victims and by letting you do this I have failed them.” He stopped and ran both hands through his hair. There was less anger now; instead he seemed tired, and sad. “Someone else has gone missing, a woman with two little kids, I …” He shook his head ruefully. “You’d think I’d have learned my lesson about telling you this stuff, right? The point is, I don’t have time for it. Not if I want to stop this bastard.”

  “I’m sorry, Ben.”

  “Yeah, well. I’m sorry, too.”

  He offered to drive her back to Balesford, but she refused; the idea of another entirely silent car journey with him was too m
uch. Instead she called for a cab and stood out by the bagel shop waiting for it. When it came, she gave the driver her mother’s address, and then sat in the back seat, peering out at the rain smeared streets as they went. When they passed an off license with all its lights still on, she got the cab to stop and nipped inside, returning to the car with a bottle of vodka and a packet of paracetamol.

  If she had to go back to her mum’s house, it wasn’t going to be sober.

  * * *

  Later, a few vodkas into the evening and feeling both sick and very tired, Heather was curled up on her mother’s sofa with Pamela Whittaker’s album on her lap. Whether it was the alcohol or the effects of a very rough couple of days, Heather was finding each image more unsettling than the last—and there were so many of them. Pamela might have regretted her time at Fiddler’s Mill, but it had certainly inspired her; there were photographs and images packed in so thickly that in some places Heather found several images hidden under another, crammed in like grisly pressed leaves.

  The forest featured a lot, as did the big old house, and the sky at sunrise or sunset. There were fewer photographs of the other people at the commune, but each of these Heather scrutinized carefully, scanning every face for something familiar. Each time she failed to find anything she felt the tension thrumming through her lessen a little.

  And then she turned a page a little too quickly, and several photographs slid out, fanning across her leg as though they were eager for her to see them. One of them caught her eye immediately.

  It was her mother. Painfully young, and dressed in a bulky winter coat that came right up to her chin, but it was her all right. It was a shot of a crowd, gathered around a smoky fire, and there were lots of other people crowding close to the camera, but there was no mistaking her really—the only thing Heather didn’t recognize was the carefree expression on her face; her whole face lit up with the idea of freedom. And in the background, on the top of a hill, the big house lurked. She had been at Fiddler’s Mill. There was no avoiding it.