I shake my head. ‘I’m tired,’ I tell her. ‘I just want to go to my room.’
I take myself away from her.
Upstairs, Hope’s room pulls me towards it. It’s opposite mine, and the door is firmly closed. Apparently, the police were in there earlier, searching for clues, taking away anything they thought might be useful: her iPad; that one letter from her mum; whatever they could lay their hands on, I suppose.
I ease the handle down and push the door open, half expecting to see her sitting up in bed, smiling at me in that way she had, then patting the covers so I’ll walk over and sit beside her, lean my head on her shoulder…
The room is empty, of course, and exactly as she’d left it last night: a black sheet pinned to the window frame; her clothes all over the floor, the wardrobe door still flung open; the bed unmade. I stare at the black lace throw she’d spread over the duvet, and my mind floods with images of the long days and nights we’d spent there, our limbs tangled together so you could barely make out which body belonged to who.
I shut the door, crawl into bed and wrap myself up in the smell of her.
I barely sleep. All night, I see her but know that I am dreaming. She’s lying there beneath me, blonde hair spread over the pillow, her face wide with pleasure, the white arc of her stomach against mine. We are skin on skin, a tangle of limbs, pure as angels even though everyone says it is wrong and we shouldn’t be doing this. They know nothing about us, nothing about love.
Then suddenly, from nowhere, she is surrounded by water, dragging her under, away from me. I reach out my hand to pull her back, but she’s sinking, further and further. ‘Come with me,’ she says. ‘You said you’d come with me.’ And the look on her face as the black water covers her is one of absolute betrayal.
I wake up sobbing. She is gone. Again and again, she is gone.
18
I can’t keep it up, watching her suffer like this. I try telling myself she deserves it, that she made a sacrifice of me for nothing and still isn’t doing anything to put it right, but anger is hard when I can see how much pain she’s in. I don’t know how she’ll ever get over this, or how she’ll face the world alone without me. That’s it now, for Annie. She’s not yet sixteen years old and all the love of her life is behind her.
She’s clever, though. Maybe she’ll turn to that instead.
I watch her for a while, crying in my bed.
I love you, I whisper, but I don’t think she hears.
In the morning, Annie is still crying and in the room next door, I can see Lara listening to her weep. Another Christmas over, and she isn’t sure whether it’s been the worst one of her life or not. All she really knows is that she has the old, empty feeling inside her again, and also that she doesn’t want any of it – the crying, the anger, the drama – coming anywhere near her.
The sky has hardly been out for weeks. It’s been hidden by a thick sway of white cloud that rolls low on the fells, shutting out the sun and keeping the days dark. Lara sits at her window and looks out over the winter landscape: the white peaks and deep-brown drop of the fells; the waterfalls, frozen into silence; fields stiffened with frost. On the stone path just below her room, a pheasant jerks its way towards the hedgerows. Instantly, Lara is transported to the last day she’d ever spent alone with her father, when she was six years old and he’d taken her shooting. He used to love shooting pheasants. For weeks afterwards, they’d hang upside-down in the small room off the kitchen, and sometimes Lara would creep inside and stare at the brown-feathered creatures, slowly rotting at the neck. She’d breathe in the muscular scent of them and wonder why her father wanted to kill them, instead of just letting them fly.
‘I’ll show you,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll show you why.’ And he bundled her into her bright-yellow jacket and took her out over the fields to the woods with his friends, where they stood for ages in the cold while the men battered the heather to make the birds fly over their heads and her father aimed his rifle and shot them out of the sky.
‘There,’ he said triumphantly, but Lara still didn’t get it.
‘You’re cruel,’ she said, looking at the beautiful dead birds dangling from her father’s hand.
‘You won’t be saying that when you eat it,’ he told her, smiling down at her and ruffling her hair.
‘I’m not eating it.’
They walked home together slowly. Her father took Lara’s hand in his and after a while he said, ‘I’m sorry I frightened you the other night.’
He was talking about kicking her door when he’d been drunk.
‘I was afraid your mother was going to hurt you, and I wanted to get to you first.’
Lara nodded. She was afraid of her mother, but she was scared of him, too, when he carried on like that. On his face now was a deep gash that he’d covered in gauze and tape; her mother had hurled herself at him yesterday and run her keys down his face. He’d made a movement towards her, but she’d sneered at him and said, ‘Lay one finger on me and I’ll call the police and tell them you beat me. You’ll lose everything. Me, the kids, everything…’
He’d slumped in the armchair then and sat for a long time with his head in his hands.
Now, he tightened his grip on Lara’s hand and said, ‘We’ll get away from her, Lara. I promise you that. As soon as we can.’
Lara always knew about us. She knew we slept in the same room together almost every night, and often she’d sit at her window and watch us as we disappeared hand in hand, away over the fells to some secluded spot where we could be alone, without staff trying to separate us, or stop us even from touching.
‘Underage sex is underage sex, girls,’ Helen would say. ‘Our job is to protect you. You will sleep in your own rooms at night, and you are not to be together during the day without adult supervision.’
We took no notice, though. We just ran away and spent whole days in places only we knew about, while Helen and Danny anxiously discussed how to put a stop to it.
Lara also knew that I was pregnant. She wasn’t stupid. She knew how it would have happened, and that it had nothing to do with Annie.
None of the staff knew about the pregnancy. I kept it hidden, and was hardly showing at all. It was only when I lifted my clothes that you could see it – the gentle rise of a baby beneath my skin.
Lara wasn’t supposed to know, of course. She only found out because when Annie and I had run off one day, she’d gone into my room and rummaged through the box where I kept all the things I didn’t want anyone else to find, like letters and condoms and money. She’d come across the scan photos: six grainy white images against a black background, all head and enormous feet. At the top it said, in small white writing: ‘Lancaster Infirmary. Hope Lacey. 19 weeks’.
She stole them. I know she did because I found them a few days later when I went looking for them. She was weird, and therefore my first suspect. In her room, right at the top of her wardrobe, there was an old rag doll with a long, jagged cut down its front that had been taped back up, as if this were the remains of some gruesome infant murder. I peeled the tape off and put my hand inside the baggy, stuffing-less belly of the doll. And there they were, the pictures from my scan.
There was no point confronting her. What would she say? Nothing at all. She’d just fix me with that empty stare, and the eyes that always seemed to say, Help me.
19
The police are on the phone. Helen’s talking to them and I’m pretty sure they’ll be coming back to nick me, or maybe they trust Helen or some other member of staff to drive me to the station because really, officially, they’re all One of Them – authorities, the social, the law. They’re all the same. Except they’re not the same. Helen’s on my side, I know that. She always is.
So now I’m moving the furniture around. I covered the blood up with the rug at first, but it’s not enough. I need to put something heavy over it, something no one will bother to move if they come in to clean – although really, I’m meant to clean this room myself
. I ought to have nothing to worry about, but you can’t trust the police. They’ll arrest anyone, just to make it look like they’ve got a handle on things so the public don’t start having crazy protest marches, blocking off the traffic and holding up banners with stuff like ‘Find Hope’s Killer’ written on them. I’m not taking any chances.
I leave the rug where it is and hoist the desk on top of it as an extra layer of protection. Afterwards, I sit on the bed, out of breath and anxious, and stare at this new arrangement. It’s obvious, I think. It looks like I’m deliberately hiding something. But I don’t know what else to do.
Tell them. Tell them about Ace.
My eyes dart around the room. Out loud, I say, ‘Where are you?’ because I can hear her and feel her as clearly as if she were here beside me.
There is only silence.
I tell myself she’s dead. It’s been three days since I last held her hand, or felt the sweet brush of her lips against mine. Just three days, and already this ache of longing for her is enough to stop my breath. It suffocates me, like panic. I haven’t got it in me now to go to the police station again and face all those questions and accusations. I just want to lie here in my darkened room and remember her until she appears again.
Perhaps I am going mad, I think. Perhaps I am going mad like my mother.
If death were a person, it would look like Hope. That was the first thing I thought when I met her – that she was spectral, mysterious, not part of this world. She did it deliberately. She powdered her face white and wore nothing but black: long, whispering skirts, lace tops, velvet dresses, boots, hats, chokers … The only colour was in her hair. She never dyed it and it fell naturally in blonde waves all the way to her waist.
She carried about her the aura of a squandered angel.
I suppose that’s what she was.
I couldn’t even tell you how it started between us. All I really know is that I’d never had a friend before and suddenly we were thrown together. There wasn’t much else to do, so mostly we just sat around on the low stone wall outside the front door, smoking, and as we smoked, we talked.
The first thing she asked was, ‘Were you in other homes before this one?’
I shook my head. ‘No. Foster homes, but not a children’s home. My foster homes didn’t work out.’
‘Neither did mine,’ she said. ‘Fucking hated them. They only do it for the money, those families. They don’t actually give a shit. I was in secure before I came here. It was hardcore.’
I looked at her, feeling naïve. I had no idea what secure was. ‘Is that like prison?’ I asked.
‘Kind of. I mean, it looks like a kids’ home but there are locks on the doors and windows and you can’t get out. You’re not allowed cigarettes, or a TV in your room. But it’s safe, I suppose. Like if you’ve had a shitty time, you can go there and sort yourself out. Some of the others are there for doing bad shit, but not everyone. Some are there for their own safety. That’s why I was there. I kept running away from all my foster homes and they decided I needed locking up. I only went back to my mate’s, but they didn’t like it.’ Then she looked at me and said, ‘You look a bit posh for a kid in care. Why are you here?’
I shrugged, trying to look matter-of-fact, the way she did, as though none of it bothered me. ‘My mum was a bit mental. Then she went missing. I didn’t have any family, so they put me with foster carers but…’ I let my voice trail off. ‘I didn’t like any of them,’ I finished. Then I said, ‘You got parents?’
She took a long drag on her cigarette before answering. ‘A mum.’
‘Where’s she?’
‘Holloway.’
‘Wow.’
‘Yeah.’
‘How long’s she got?’
‘Ten years. Only been in three months.’
‘Do you speak to her?’
‘Used to.’
‘Not now?’
‘Not really. She reckons I’m the one that got her put away.’
‘Why? Did you turn her in?’
‘No.’
There was something about her tone that made me back off.
She stubbed her cigarette out on the wall and looked around at the view – the mountains, the footpaths, the dark tarn below us – and said, in a low voice, ‘Do you miss your mum?’
No one had ever asked me that before.
I said, ‘Not exactly.’
‘Go on.’
I sighed and said, ‘No. I don’t miss her. She was mental.’
Then she said, ‘But you miss a mum, right?’
‘What?’
She stopped speaking while she lit another cigarette, holding her face over the flame so it highlighted the black liner round her eyes. ‘I mean,’ she said, inhaling deeply and then flicking smoke rings through her lips, ‘you must miss the one you never had. You know, the fairy-tale one, the one who would have worn flowery skirts and smelled of washing powder. The one everyone else has.’
I laughed at that. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I miss that one.’
‘Me, too.’
We sat there for a long time, the weight of our losses between us, and I felt for the first time that someone understood me.
Now, as I sit in my room, waiting for someone to drive me back to the police station, I wonder if her mother will be coming to the funeral. Helen said the coroner will release the body soon and we can have it burned. It’s cheaper than a burial, and seeing as it all has to come out of the home’s non-existent budget, we have to go for the cheapest in everything. She said I can get some flowers if I like and read a poem or something. A poem. What a load of horseshit. No one in the world can possibly have written the words that say how I feel about her, and what it’s like now she’s gone and died.
We knew everything about each other, she and I. Everything that had ever happened to either of us. It was more than that, though. We knew how the other one’s mind and heart worked. I’d never understood that another person could make you feel whole, but she did, even though she was so different from me, even though I was so tame and boring compared to her, and none of it made very much sense. If I’d seen her profile on a dating site, I would never have gone for her. A bit mental, swears a lot, can’t read very well, likes dancing and winding people up for fun. But you don’t fall in love by CV, do you? Not unless you’re a soulless idiot. And she wasn’t that, and neither was I, for all we pretended we were.
20
Helen
The police had assigned them a Family Liaison Officer. Emma, her name was. She’d come over for the first time on Boxing Day, sat in the living room with them all and explained her role.
‘I’m here to support the bereaved through the investigation,’ she said.
It surprised Helen, and pleased her, that the police recognised the staff and children here as ‘bereaved’, even though they weren’t family, even though Annie was under suspicion of murder.
Although as soon as Emma had spoken, Annie said, ‘We’re not family.’
Emma nodded. ‘But you lived with Hope and she was a part of your life. Her sudden death is a shock to you. There will be police officers coming into your home, asking you questions, trying to work out who killed Hope and why. It’s not easy for anyone, and my job is to support you through that.’
‘Bollocks,’ Annie muttered.
Helen shot her a look. Afterwards, Annie had said, ‘Like shit is she here to support us. She’s here to pretend to support us while she snoops through our stuff and tries to do us for murder.’
It was possible, Helen thought, that she had a point.
Now, she’d come back to discuss the findings in the coroner’s report. Helen spoke to her alone in the office. It was hell, she thought, managing all the responsibility of this; standing there, tower strong, while everyone else was allowed to topple. The home was empty of atmosphere. It used to be, if not happy, at least lively enough. Hope and Annie were always hanging around downstairs with the staff, smoking cigarettes in the garden, watching TV,
playing on the Wii. Lara would lurk in the shadows, a silent, disturbing presence but visible. Now, Hope had been killed, Annie was in despair and Lara … Well, Lara struck Helen as the closest a person could be to dead while still inhabiting a living, breathing body.
This wasn’t the home she wanted to run. She knew most of the kids who came here were way beyond saving, but she’d always wanted them to be able to remember it as being safe and good enough, with staff who cared and were fun to be around. Now, their experience here was only adding to their trauma, to their sense of the world as a hostile, dangerous place where they were blamed for things other people were guilty of. Because never was Helen going to believe it had been Annie who’d killed Hope. She’d driven Annie back to the police station this morning to be interviewed and no doubt locked up again, but she was prepared to fight now, as hard as she would if one of her own children had been accused.
Emma sat before her and said, ‘The autopsy has shown that Hope died from drowning. The samples of water in her lungs come from Meddleswater. She was also intoxicated. Very, very drunk.’
‘Right,’ Helen said, and felt as if she was dragging her mind on the ground behind her, her thoughts failing to take clear shape.
She wasn’t really sure what this meant.
Emma continued, ‘Suicide by drowning is rare. Usually, in cases like this, the coroner will conclude the death was accidental, but there are cuts and bruises to her wrists that indicate a struggle and make it seem likely that someone pushed her…’
Helen said, ‘Hope was a self-harmer. She was prone to cutting her own wrists.’
Emma shook her head. ‘These wounds were inflicted just before she died.’
God, they could find out anything, these coroners. How anyone ever got away with a crime these days, Helen had no idea.
The Home Page 6
