‘And there were traces of semen in her body, indicating that she’d been involved in some kind of sexual activity very shortly before death. We are looking now at rape.’
Helen couldn’t keep up with this. Annie and Hope, deeply involved in a same-sex relationship and afraid they were going to be separated when the home shut down, disappeared one night; Hope was raped and then drowned. And yet Annie had been there all along…
‘She was also pregnant. Were you aware of this?’
‘What?’
‘Twenty-weeks, or thereabouts.’
‘But she was thin as a board.’
‘The coroner does acknowledge that in his report. Hope was a small girl. The bump had been barely visible beneath her clothes.’
Helen nodded. ‘And is the pregnancy … relevant, do you think?’
‘It’s certainly notable.’
Helen tunnelled back through her memory. Twenty weeks would take them to July. Was it July when Hope had run away? She couldn’t remember. She’d have to look at the log book.
‘Do you know who the father was?’
‘Tests have been carried out on the foetus and we’re waiting for the results.’
‘It will be Ace,’ Helen said. ‘Ace Clarke.’
Emma’s eyes kindled with interest. She took a notebook from the pocket of her uniform. ‘Can you tell me a bit more about this?’
Helen worked hard to keep her explanation short. Just thinking of Ace Clarke incited rage in her, the sort of rage that was so strong she could talk about him for hours, going round and round in a narrative circle as she tried to make sense of the damage he’d caused and the influence he’d still had on Hope.
She looked Emma square in the face. ‘I know Annie can be difficult. I know she can. But she’s not a killer. If Hope’s death was murder, Ace Clarke will be behind it.’
21
Poor Annie. The grief is already killing her and now she has to go to the station again and face all those questions about whether she murdered me or not. Ace, I keep reminding her. You have to tell them about Ace.
But I don’t know whether she’s even got it in her to do anything other than stay completely silent and let them take her down. There’s only so much drama one person can handle in a lifetime, and I’m sure she must be near the end of her quota now. All these visits to the police station are bringing back the guilt about her mum, the fear that she’d be found out.
I wonder if she’s on the verge of tipping over the edge and joining me here.
She’s a dark horse, my Annie. I used to trust her. I used to trust her with everything, but now I’m not sure she’ll have the courage to see this through.
22
‘You’ll need to put the attitude away this time, Annie,’ Helen told me earlier, when she dropped me back here, ready to face the interviews. She’s hardly been home since it happened, even though she’s only meant to work normal office hours. The rest of the staff do three days on, three days off, and you can tell they’re always gagging to be gone by the end of the second day.
‘Just tell them the truth,’ she said. ‘I know this is really hard for you, Annie. We all know that; but the more you co-operate, the quicker it will all be over and you can put this horrible arrest behind you.’
‘Do you think they’ll let me go?’ I asked, because I was frightened. I’m always afraid of getting into trouble. I blame my mother for it, and just to prove this isn’t the nastiness of a teenage girl, so does the counsellor they make me see at the home. She says I carry the guilt of my background and my mother’s madness, that I’m hard-wired to feel it’s always my fault and hide everything I can – like knives, for example, and blood on the carpet.
‘Of course they will, love,’ she said. ‘They’ve done the post-mortem and they’ll have the evidence now. They can’t do you for something you’re not guilty of.’
I didn’t say anything. I was afraid I might cry if I did.
I’m here now, doing what Helen told me to do. No attitude, no rudeness, no swearing. Hope would be gutted if she could see me like this, meek in the interview room they’d brought me to the other day, answering questions obediently, giving them the story they want. Still, I have to admit, it makes these police officers a lot friendlier towards you if you do what they ask, so maybe she’d let me off this once.
I keep thinking maybe she can see me, maybe she can hear me somehow. I still feel her everywhere I go, as if she’s sitting beside me, keeping watch. Sometimes, her presence is loving; other times, it feels as though she’s angry. She has a lot to be angry about, I know that, but then again, I have a lot to lose my mind over.
They’re the same police interviewing me as last time, and I wonder if they ever go home. WPC Muzna Rahman and Sergeant Graham French. It’s beyond me why anyone would want to do this job. Power, I suppose. They love it.
Enough of that. There’s a tape recorder running. I must get on and co-operate. Those last interviews were a disaster and it can all work against me if this ends up in court. I need to put it right now.
Do it, she’s whispering. Tell them about Ace.
23
Everyone’s mad in this place. At the moment, Lara’s outside, harvesting the dead. There’s been a sudden cold snap and the landscape is frozen. The tarn is rigid with ice, the highest peaks soft with snow, and the white sky above them sags with the promise of more. None of the wildlife can cope with it and everything is dying. She’s found more dead bodies over the last three days than she has in all the time she’s lived here.
This is what she does when the world gets too much for her. It’s a lot like self-harming, only weirder. She collects insects, mice, birds – anything she can find – and hides them all in a shoebox at the top of her wardrobe, the way she did with my scan photos. Now and then, she’ll bring it out and check on them. She likes watching the creatures, especially the rodents, as their carcasses fill with gas and bloat. Some will explode from the pressure and shoot their remains all over the shoebox, others just slowly rot away. Her whole room carries the smell of decaying mice, but she doesn’t mind. She likes it. Sometimes, she’ll breathe in the dark, furry scent of it and let it transport her. It takes her to other worlds. She can see herself walking among the dead, until she’s almost become them.
When I watch her, she reminds me of me.
Nearly everyone she knows is dead, and she’s as good as dead, too. No one takes any notice of her, but she prefers it this way. It’s much better than the days when everyone wanted to make her speak. They thought she just refused, that all she needed was to open her mouth and the words would come tumbling out, as if she were an actor on a stage. ‘If you speak to us, Lara,’ her old foster carer had said to her once, ‘we’ll take you to Disneyland. How does that sound?’
This is the first time she’s been out since they found my body. For the last three days, she’s been lying in her room with her eyes closed. Still, silent, visionless. That was the way to get through this. They wouldn’t speak to her, they’d leave her alone, if she did nothing, said nothing, saw nothing.
But even though no one sees her, she sees everything. She sees everything that has ever happened to her, and she sees it all the time, as if her mind is a crystal ball that doesn’t show images of the future – because there isn’t one – but the past. It keeps becoming more and more crowded. She’s sure it’s going to get too full one day, and then it will shatter and that will be that. She hopes it won’t take too long. Like me, she just wants to go, to be gone. Like me, the only people she ever cared about are dead.
She was six years old at the time, her baby sister was two. Her parents were arguing, as usual, and the baby was crying. Then just like that, the room turned red. When the police came and took her and her father away, she left a trail of red footprints wherever she walked.
For a long time afterwards, she couldn’t remember anything about that night. There was a dark hole in her mind, filled with water. She was weighed down by it, but not a
single image came back to her. Then they made her remember for the trial. She’d been the only witness, so had to tell them what happened. For weeks and weeks, she worked with a woman who kept finding new ways to jog her memory, until she could show her with dolls and toy guns exactly what her father had done.
And after that, she couldn’t forget.
No one knows that Lara can remember. Her social worker helped her make a life book, filled with pictures of her with her family before they’d all been brought down by her father’s gun. It’s meant to show her she has a history, give her something to hold on to as she moves from placement to placement. But Lara has always known that none of it is real. All those happy faces in the photos; the handsome man who was her father; the pink-faced infant who was her sister; the smiling, brown-haired woman who was her mother. Those smiles never lasted beyond the camera’s click. Everyone just went back to hating each other.
Why isn’t the house clean, when you’re at home all day?
Why aren’t we rich, when you’re at work all day?
They were always shouting at each other, her parents. And drunk. They drank a lot, every night, and it made them argue and bash each other about. Not just her father, her mother as well. Her mother hadn’t been one of those quiet victims who lay still while her husband beat her. She gave as good as she got.
The trouble with murder was it was never silent. There were gunshots and screams. And words. Before the death came the words. Sharp as daggers, and cruel enough to kill.
They are all Lara can hear. Her mother’s words, her father’s words. They squat inside her, and beat like an extra heart.
She goes inside, through the back door so she can avoid Helen in her office at the front of the house. Today, she’s found a beetle, a field mouse and a song thrush, and arranged them in the shoebox, alongside the skeleton of a blackbird from before Christmas. She stands silently in the doorway and lets her eyes scoot about for a minute, working out where everyone is, then darts away upstairs, unseen.
For a while, she sits on the bed and examines her treasures. She’s never found a song thrush before, but she was able to identify it because the teacher who comes to the home left her a book of birds last week and Lara spent a whole afternoon reading it from cover to cover and memorising the pictures. She holds the bird in the palm of her hand. Its head is thrown back, exposing all the deep brown spots like arrows over its pale breast. She runs a finger over the feathers. They’re cold and soft, and the touch of them brings tears to her eyes.
She picks the bird up, and holds it to her cheek.
24
We were thrown together a lot in those early days. In the mornings, we had to spend two hours with the teacher they dragged to the home to keep us going with English and maths, but afterwards we were allowed to spend our time doing whatever we liked. Hope slept a lot. She slept more than I’d ever known anyone sleep. I wondered if she was ill. ‘No,’ she shrugged, ‘just bored. This place is shit.’
Every day, they gave us half an hour each on the Internet. She had her own iPad and used it for shopping on eBay. Packages arrived for her all the time. Mostly, they were filled with second-hand dresses and jewellery she’d snapped up for less than a fiver, but then one day she declared, ‘I hate my room. The magnolia walls and the white furniture. It’s like a hospital or something. I need to sort it out. Make it more … you know… me.’
‘More black, you mean? Or more like a coffin?’
‘Both.’
Helen said it was her room and she could do what she liked with it, so every day for a week, we sat on her bed together and ordered whatever she could lay her hands on to transform it. She had a gift for finding cool, cheap things. ‘No, I don’t,’ she said. ‘I just never buy anything that costs more than five quid. There’s loads of it if you search.’
By the time we’d finished, her bed was covered with a crushed-velvet throw, light was banished by sarongs at the windows, the ceiling was draped with yards of old black lace and all over the place were weird little trinkets and ornaments: hanging bats; a lampshade in the shape of a witch’s hat, gargoyles and black candle holders that cast an eerie glow over the room whenever she lit them.
‘Let me read your cards,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t want to know the future.’
‘I’ll deal you a good one, then.’
‘That’s cheating.’
‘Oh God, Annie. You’re so straight.’
So I let her do it. I wasn’t sure how good she was at this, or if any of it had any meaning, but she was always dealing me futures, filled with good things and love and happiness, but then one day she looked hard at the cards in front of her and said, ‘There’s hell ahead,’ and even though I prodded and prodded her, she refused to say any more about it.
Sometimes now, I think it was herself she’d seen in that reading: the love of my life, bursting in and then fading away, only ever in love with death.
It was her fifteenth birthday a month after she arrived. The staff tried to make it special by frying pancakes for breakfast, baking her a chocolate cake and giving her a not-too-crappy present – a black hat with a veil; she loved it. But birthdays, like Christmas, are never good times for kids without families. Later in the morning, she and I were sitting on the wall outside, smoking as usual, and she said suddenly, ‘I was hoping my mum would send me a card today.’
It was the first time she’d said anything about her family since she told me about her mum being in Holloway. I’d steered far away from that area. My own mother wasn’t a subject I wanted to share with anyone. I assumed she was the same.
I said, ‘There’s still time.’
She shrugged. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Postman’s been.’
Her pain was palpable, even as she tried to hide it.
‘Does she know you’re here?’
‘Yeah. I mean, someone has to have told her I’m out of secure. I’ve written to her in prison a few times.’
‘Has she ever replied?’
She shook her head. ‘Never. I don’t know. I used to think maybe she had no time, or they didn’t let her or something, but they must do. I had this deadline in my head. If I hadn’t heard from her by then, I’d have to just accept it’s because she hates me. I turned her in, after all.’
Tentatively, I said, ‘What was the deadline?’
She inhaled on her cigarette and looked away from me. ‘Today.’
‘Let’s get out of here,’ she said.
‘Where to?’
‘I don’t know. Anywhere. Let’s just walk. See where we end up.’
We took a path that led uphill, away from the house. We had no idea where we were going, and the climb made us both breathless. The peaks of the lower fells were beneath us; the slate-grey drama of the higher ones ahead, and the further on we went, the more I felt I was stepping deeper and deeper into something like peace, as unfamiliar to me as anything on earth.
After a while, the path wound off the open fell and into woodland, where the light became tinged with green and we could hear the distant rumble of falling waters.
We stood for a while to catch our breath.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’
I nodded, silenced.
She waved her hand expansively, as if taking in the whole landscape of the Lake District. ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing,’ she said, ‘if you just got lost out here and no one found you until you were gone?’
The words took me aback. I wasn’t sure what to make of them. Lightly, I said, ‘No. It wouldn’t be amazing. It would be shit.’
Her voice took on a dreamy tone. ‘I don’t think so. I think it would be great. Imagine just walking out here, out in the hills for miles and miles, maybe in the snow and the frost, until you just slowly start to run out of energy and your legs stop working and you fall down and freeze into a deep sleep and never wake up again.’
I shuddered. ‘Stop it, Hope. You’re freaking me
out.’
She stood there in her black dress and Doc Martens, and stared at me with wide eyes, as if she couldn’t believe what I was saying. ‘Am I?’
‘Yes, you weirdo. Stop it.’
She laughed.
I said, ‘I got you a birthday present. It’s only small. I didn’t want to give it to you before.’
‘What is it?’
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tiny gift I’d wrapped for her the day before.
She opened it quickly. A bat choker. ‘I love it,’ she said, and immediately fastened it round her neck.
Then we started walking again and she took my hand. It didn’t feel weird.
The sky was thick with dusk when we finally got back to the home. The staff on duty were annoyed with us.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Clare demanded. ‘We were on the verge of calling the police.’
I wasn’t used to being in trouble. It still frightened me. I hung my head, the way I used to during my mother’s rages, trying to tune her out.
But Hope was breezy about it. ‘We only went for a walk,’ she said. ‘You’re always saying we should make the most of this Lake District place, so we did. We went off into the hills. Saw some great stuff. Birds and shit. I dunno. A deer.’ She shrugged and looked at me, ‘What else did we see, Annie?’
I was silent.
‘There were no men out there,’ she told them, in a tone of reassurance. ‘You don’t need to worry. We haven’t been corrupted.’
‘That’s enough, Hope. You both know you’re not meant to wander off unsupervised.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake. We’re fucking fifteen. Come on, Annie,’ she said. Then she opened the fridge and brought out a bottle of Diet Coke, along with a six-pack of Wotsits from the cupboard. We took them up to her room.
The Home Page 7
