They were in hysterics when Robert strutted up with his arms held out wide like a conquering hero. They changed their tune—Hey, hey! Here’s the man of the moment!—and there was jolly banter about what a bloody lucky guy he was. If Robert heard what they’d been saying seconds earlier, he didn’t let on. His grin still didn’t slip at all.
At ten o’clock Aunt Monique drove Sam home. The newlyweds, as she kept calling them, were going to sleep in the bridal suite at Jackson’s Lodge. This thought made Monique smirk.
The farmhouse was empty and cold when they walked in. Aunt Monique was empty and cold too. She’d never liked Sam. The feeling was mutual.
‘Well!’ she sighed, as she took off her pointy-toed shoes. ‘I must say, I think you and my sister have fallen on your feet. I’m not quite sure how she did it. You couldn’t ask for a better stepfather.’
It was too much.
‘He killed my dad,’ Sam blurted.
Her eyes flew wide open. She raised her hand as though about to slap him, and he ducked.
‘Now look, you vindictive little monster,’ she hissed, ‘if I ever … ever … hear you say that again, you’ll regret it. Okay? Comprendo? It’s against the law to tell lies like that. You’ll go to prison!’
‘No, I won’t.’
‘Oh yes, you will.’ She was nodding and nodding. She looked a little bit crazy. ‘You will! Prison! Your mummy won’t be coming there with you. And you don’t want to know what happens to good-looking boys like you in prison.’
‘What happens?’ asked Sam.
She told him in graphic detail. She was a good storyteller. His eyes grew wide with horror as he listened. According to Aunt Monique, being in prison would involve people’s bodies, including Sam’s, being used in ways he’d never begun to imagine. She said bullies would torture him and he’d be screaming for help, and they’d tear his bottom, and nobody would stop them. They would do it every single day. She said he wouldn’t survive a week in there.
He knows now she was making it all up, just trying to frighten him. For a start, kids don’t go to adult prisons, do they? But he’s never forgotten the sick fear he felt while she was describing it. He was crying by the end.
‘Robert Lacey had nothing to do with your father’s death,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’
‘Didn’t Harriet tell you? No? Well, she should have done—then you’d know not to go accusing people. They cut Angus open and took out all his organs. His brain and everything. It’s called an autopsy.’
This was an even worse idea than the one about prison.
‘They didn’t cut my dad open,’ he insisted.
Her smile was small and mean. ‘The man’s heart was a ticking time bomb. He was never going to make old bones. Robert Lacey is a saint to take you on, and don’t you forget it. A saint. Nobody else would be saddled with you.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you, Sam Ballard, are a big problem.’
Alone in his bedroom, he dug the Santa Claus devil out of the cupboard and fetched a pair of nail scissors from the first-aid kit in the bathroom. He sat on his bed and stabbed the puppet in both its chests. He dug in the pointed blades of the scissors and tore the fabric until yellow lumps of foam stuffing spilled out. It’s called an autopsy.
But neither of its grins ever slipped at all.
•
He has to stop talking. He can’t go on.
The Ritalin’s not working so well anymore. His mind is jangling and full of screams and his forehead’s throbbing where he bashed it and his mouth feels weirdly dry despite all the tea Mutesi’s been pouring down him and he’s longing to curl up in one of the booths and fall asleep and he … what were they talking about? Sleep. Deep, deep sleep so that he can stop struggling and forget everything that’s ever happened. Forever.
‘Forever,’ he mumbles.
‘I’m still here,’ says Eliza. ‘You okay, Sam?’
She’s trying to keep him from sliding away, but she can’t. Julia will grow up with no dad. She’s much better off that way. She’s his little smiling friend, who skips beside him wherever he goes. He loves her so much. It will be awful when she gets to school and other kids tease her and say her dad was a murderer. Kids can be mean. But at least she won’t have a father in prison, and at least Robert won’t be there to ruin her life. He’s achieved something, hasn’t he?
‘You there? Sam?’
‘Let me see Julia. Please let me see Julia. Just once.’
Her next words are drowned out by the jangling. When he can hear her again, she’s trying to convince him that it’s impossible to bring Julia.
‘My boss isn’t allowing her to go into Tuckbox. There’s Robert dead in there, and … let’s be honest, it’s a crime scene. No place for a child, is it?’
He only wants to say goodbye. This morning, when he ran back to the truck, he still had choices. He could have hopped in and driven away. He could have emigrated to Australia or something. He could have chosen to live, but he didn’t. He came charging back in here and shot Robert, and in that moment he made his choice.
It’s almost dark outside. Today is almost over. He’s running out of lifetime.
‘Hey,’ says Eliza. ‘What’s that beeping noise? Is your phone’s battery going flat? Sam?’
TWENTY-FIVE
Rosie
The whole of her left side is numb now. She feels as though she’s rotting away along with the wet wood of the cupboard. She’s still holding the door shut, and her curled fingers feel brittle. She imagines trying to straighten them, imagines them cracking.
She checks the time on her phone. Nearly four.
When will you get me?
Four o’clock. See the little hand on the clock?
Julia will have put her own coat on by now. She’s clever like that. She’ll be all ready, sitting on the chair near the door, swinging her legs, singing to herself. She might be holding a picture she’s painted today, or scones they’ve made in the nursery kitchen.
She’ll be waiting and waiting. Soon she’ll be getting worried. She’s always had a fear of being forgotten but these past few months have been much worse. She was taken away from her dad—it was his fault, really, but how could a three-year-old understand that? She saw him shouting and attacking her mum. She left the only home she’d ever known and then she lost her granny. Too much sadness for a very small person.
This day may leave Julia without parents or grandparents, and there’s nobody else she knows. She might end up in a children’s home, or with foster parents! That would break her heart.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
The battery is down to fifteen per cent. Just enough. Soon it will die. She squints into the dark, wondering how to pack a lifetime of love into one short message.
Abi
She’s a prisoner, trapped with three total strangers, drinking builder’s brew tea out of a white mug. She’s watching the setting sun touch the face of a murderer.
Kelly Bradshaw will have been given bail and sent home by now. Charlie might have phoned the clinic. Poor Charlie. It’s negative. She knows it is, because at two o’clock this morning she did a home pregnancy test. Stupid thing to do. They say not to—it’s too early, can give a false negative, better to wait for the more reliable clinic result—but she was so hopeful. She felt different. She imagined waking Charlie up then and there, with a kiss and the magical news. She imagined the look on his face and she just couldn’t wait! She was so sure, so excited when she opened the box.
But no. Instead she lay in a sleepless mess of disappointment, wondering whether they could go through it all over again. Perhaps they should start telling the world the truth. We can’t have kids. It’s not happening.
She invited Rory and Renata around for a drink when they first moved into number 96. It seemed the neighbourly thing to do. Mistake. Big mistake. They left their dogs at home but turned up with identical miniature demons called William and Albert. Bill and Bert.
It took Renata three minutes to ask The Question.
‘So you’re dinkies?’
Abi froze. ‘Sorry?’
‘You know: dinky. Dual income, no kids yet.’ Renata’s gaze was darting around the obviously-child-free courtyard. No plastic slide, no sandpit or paddling pool, no baby gym.
Charlie was opening a bottle of wine at the time, screwing in the corkscrew, mouth pursed in concentration. She wanted to hug him.
‘That’s us,’ he said quietly. ‘Yup. Dinkies.’
‘Our lifestyle’s not really compatible with a family,’ added Abi.
It was their go-to lie. It avoided the pity, the questions—What’s the problem? You? Him? You don’t know? How can you not know? That particular evening she’d been pumping herself full of hormones for their second round of IVF. She felt as though she was dragging a heavy weight around. Every joint ached.
‘Oh, it’s never the right time!’ Renata stooped to drop nauseating little kisses onto Bill’s head—mwah, mwah. ‘You’ve no idea what you’re missing.’
Of course bloody Rory piled in. He’s in advertising, spends more time with his Tesla than he does with his family, but—like everyone else in the world—he’s an expert on the joys of parenting.
‘You just have to get on with it,’ he urged, with a jab of his right fist. ‘Jump right in.’
‘I don’t have a maternal bone in my body,’ said Abi.
‘’Course you do.’
Charlie knew this game. ‘We won’t be cluttering up the planet with resource-guzzling little clones of ourselves.’
It was easier, this: to be rebels who’d cheerfully plumped for child-free living rather than a desperate duo who traipsed to and from the fertility clinic, suffering indignity and pain and cost, trying to achieve what other people did so easily.
Abi shakes herself, dragging her thoughts back from private sadness. Sam’s still talking. This negotiator has the patience of ten saints. Sam seems to be returning to his most agitating memories again and again, leaping backwards and forwards in time, yet the even-toned murmur on the other end of the line never seems to hurry him. Abi would have snapped by now.
‘I don’t think he loved Mum at all,’ he’s saying. ‘I think he got off on control.’
Yep. The man was a bastard. Now can we cut to the chase? You have precisely one minute to answer the following questions—One: Why’d you kill him? In a nutshell, please! Two: What exactly are you hoping to achieve? Three: When do we get out of here?
If armed responders are lined up along Wilton Street they’re in for a long, cold wait. The winter sun is almost gone, its last rays seeping between the blinds. Zebra stripes glow on Sam’s deathly pale face and strike copper sparks in his hair. He looks young, as though he’s been transformed back into the bewildered boy whose story he’s telling. Even his voice seems to have become more infantile, his vocabulary simpler, his pitch higher. He’s never still. Some part of him is always moving: a foot tapping, a knee jerking, fingers twiddling his ear. Fidget, fidget. Abi can relate to that. She’s a fidgeter herself. She loathes inactivity. Beach holidays are pure hell.
We’re all a part of his story now, she thinks. Mutesi, Neil and me. Even the ever-so-patient person on the other end of that line is being swept up in it. Our lives collided with Sam’s today. We were rolling merrily along in different directions until he smashed into us and knocked us all off course. Now we’re travelling together for a while.
She’s glad the others got away. Those little children, and Brigitte, and lovely old Arthur who narrowly avoided the Balham station bomb, only to be caught up in Sam Ballard’s private war. She’s glad to see the back of Paige too, but not for such charitable reasons. Abi feels more attuned to Sam than she does to that woman, with her baby bump and pushchair and polka-dotted changing bag and maternity jeans and scruffy fleece-lined boots, and that ostentatiously messy hair with dark roots showing, just like Lottie’s—Sod it, Abi, I haven’t got time for the hairdresser, I’m a mother, not a model!
Mutesi is still stretched out in a booth. She looks supremely comfortable, though from time to time she stirs. Abi suspects that her languor is an act, that she’s alert and listening intently. Neil is microwaving himself a fish pie in a glass dish. He keeps frowning towards the front window. Probably worrying about his dog. The wind’s getting up now, and rain is forecast for tonight.
A twinge of cramp throbs in Abi’s right knee. She grabs her ankle and pulls her leg high up in front of the chair. She’s beginning to feel … no, surely it’s not possible. Her life is in immediate danger, she’s making headline news, there’s a bloodied corpse developing rigor mortis under her favourite coat. She can’t possibly be bored.
The films have it all wrong. She and Charlie have watched Die Hard almost every Boxing Day since they met. It’s their happy tradition. Bruce Willis, turkey sandwiches, the bottle of bubbly Great-Aunt Phyllis gives them every year. There’s not a dull moment in the Die Hard siege: it’s a white-knuckle roller-coaster ride with one crisis after another. Completely unrealistic, she now knows. The challenge in Tuckbox isn’t just terror, it’s passivity. It’s helplessness. It’s being forced to wait for others to act.
When Abi was about six, Great-Aunt Phyllis gave her an illustrated version of the story of Rapunzel. At first Abi loved the book and pored over its sumptuous pictures: Rapunzel, a beautiful prisoner in her tower, with her blue eyes and golden river of hair. Eventually Abi outgrew fairytales and put away childish things.
She was sixteen and cynical when she next flicked through her old favourite. Well! What an irritating story. Rapunzel, she now saw, was a total drip. All that golden hair, useful only as a kind of coiffured ladder for witches and men. Teenager Abi despised the moronic girl and her annoying prince. She covered the pages in felt-tip pen graffiti: twirly moustaches on Rapunzel, with speech bubbles to make her say things like I’m a boring virgin. She turned the prince into a fairy with wings and ballet shoes. The only character she left intact was the witch. The old bat might be wicked but at least she got things done; she didn’t wait around for some man to rescue her. Abi determined that she never would either. The witch was the only character she respected. She’d far rather be a witch than a princess.
Famous last words. Here she is, making friends with her captor, meekly waiting to be rescued by a load of macho guys in combat gear.
Something nudges her upper arm. Neil’s elbow. He’s scoffing fish pie and resolutely keeping his gaze fixed on Sam, but his hand has slid along the table towards her. She looks down to see a serviette with a single line of handwriting in green pencil.
Nicola’s hiding in a cupboard in the back kitchen
Nicola. Nicola. Who the hell is Nicola?
Hang on—Nicola! The woman Sam’s been raving about—the woman who seems to be the cause of this whole disaster. How the hell can Sam’s ex be in the back kitchen? How? Ah. The penny drops into place. Nicola, who saw Sam and legged it. She never actually got out of the café. It’s farcical—it’s almost hilarious. Abi has no sympathy at all for a princess who left Robert to stop a bullet on her behalf. Maybe she should have stayed to fight her own battles. Serves her right if she’s stuck in a cupboard.
Smoothing the serviette, she slides a biro from her handbag and scribbles rapidly.
She’s got to come out and talk to him.
When Neil shakes his head, she writes: Less volatile now, be ok
‘Are you prepared to bet her life on that?’ Neil whispers out of the corner of his mouth. ‘She’s not.’
So we deal with her ex for her?
Neil grabs the serviette, crumples it up and shoves it into his pocket. Abi has a good mind to march back there, find this mythical female and haul her out to face the music. Nicola’s the one person who might be able to bring all this to an end.
She’s distracted by a change in Sam’s voice. Something is going wrong with his phone call. He’s on his feet, glancing anxiously around the café.
‘T
hat noise? Yeah, you’re right,’ he says. ‘It’s the battery. What do I do?’
‘Hell,’ groans Abi. ‘No, no, no! This can’t happen. That bloody phone’s going flat. Hang on, Sam! I’ll see if I’ve brought my charger. Okay?’
She dives for her handbag and begins rifling through it.
Has to be in here, has to be in here …
She’s sure she dropped her portable power bank into the side pocket before leaving the house this morning. It’s bright blue, about the size of a lipstick, cost less than a tenner—but right now it’s the most precious commodity in her world.
Don’t tell me today’s the one day I left it at home.
She has a mental image of the little blue tube, plugged into the laptop on her side of the bed. She tips the bag upside down onto the table, frantically shaking it until she’s emptied every pocket. Sam has turned away and is talking to the negotiator again.
‘You’re like Mary Poppins,’ whispers Neil with awe. ‘Sure you’re not packing an Uzi in there?’
‘I wish.’
He glances over his shoulder towards Sam. ‘Would you use it, if you had?’
‘Shoot him in the leg. Wouldn’t you?’ She gives the bag a final shake. ‘I’m normally packing a power bank. Okay—c’mon, let’s look in the kitchen. There has to be a charger somewhere. They use that phone for people to text in their orders. I texted one myself this morning. Never did get that sodding espresso.’
The pair of them scurry behind the counter, searching in nooks and crannies. Sam is still talking to the negotiator while looking along the front service counter. Mutesi swings her legs off her bench and joins in the hunt. All hands on deck. The last thing they need now is for Sam to be cut off from that soothing voice.
‘No, I haven’t got another phone,’ Sam’s insisting. ‘Mine will be at home, it was the last thing on my mind when I left. I was in a bit of a state … What? Nobody here’s got one, I don’t think. They did have, but I, um, shot ’em. Or stamped on them. I wish I hadn’t now.’
He’s listening again, shaking his head emphatically as he glances towards the door.
The Secrets of Strangers Page 17
