The Home

by Sarah Stovell

  Upstairs, Hope’s room was dark, as always, and a mess. Pretty much everything she’d owned was scattered across the floor. Helen picked up the black clothes – which now seemed so significant and sad – and folded them neatly into bags, as if somehow, in this final act of clearing her away, she could show Hope just a little of the care she’d lacked when she’d lived. She wondered, briefly, whether anyone had ever done this for her before, whether anyone had ever come into her space and gently tidied up the chaos. She suspected not.

  The drawers beside the bed were almost empty, apart from a small black box. She lifted the lid. Inside were the usual things – hair bobbles, pieces of gothic jewellery, some sample bottles of perfume she’d probably stolen from somewhere. At the bottom of the box lay a brown envelope, worn at the corners and battered with age. She opened it. A photograph. A young woman in a hospital bed, gazing at the newborn in her arms. She wore the familiar expression of the newly delivered mother: a shadow of pain, overlaid with awe. She turned it over. Bex and Hope, 14/10/2002.

  It was the photo that forced the first tears from her eyes. All these years, Hope had held on to this picture, carried it with her from foster home, from children’s home, to secure unit and back to children’s home again. It had travelled miles, up and down the country as Hope was pushed from failed placement to failed placement. Helen knew Hope couldn’t hold on to possessions. She lost them as quickly as she acquired them. But she had treasured this one picture of herself with her mother, from the day – just that one day – when her mother had known what to do, had known how to be with this baby.

  It all started going wrong when she went home from hospital.

  She shook the tears from her cheeks. She couldn’t afford this, had to treat it as work. She had no space for distress, for mourning these troubled lives that were not hers. But she couldn’t help it. Ever since she’d started this job, she’d never stopped being surprised by the children’s love for their parents. They would forgive anything, take them back, time after time, after years of nothing but hurt and betrayal. And even when there was no hope left, when the parents were locked away from the outside world and had no access to the children they’d damaged so badly, still the children would go on, barely surviving, yet always holding on to the image of what could have been, the image of everything they longed for.

  Annie was still at the station. She’d been gone hours. Helen hadn’t expected it to take this long. From what Emma had told her about the evidence from the post-mortem, she’d assumed everything now was pointing to Ace and all they wanted from Annie was an account of what had happened that night.

  Helen had pieced a few things together herself. She knew the girls had escaped, probably through Hope’s bedroom window, and wandered out on to the fells in the dark. Somewhere along the way, they’d met up with Ace, because somehow – despite everyone’s best efforts – he’d wormed his way back into Hope’s life without anyone ever knowing about it.

  And that was where the story began to fail and the missing pieces of the puzzle began to wreck her head. They’d found his semen in her body, so Hope had obviously had sex with him that night, even though Helen thought she’d come to understand by now that Ace was a rapist, not a lover, and it was Annie she loved…

  But she and Annie had been falling apart recently. They’d been arguing and fighting, and it seemed to Helen that Hope was always most at fault. She’d shout the most terrible, unthinkable things at Annie – awful things about her mother that were simply untrue. Helen knew they were untrue because she’d read the files. The police had investigated and the case was closed. But Hope would keep shouting until someone came to separate them. Annie was left distraught.

  And then the night she died, she told Danny the same old story she’d plucked out of her head and used to torture Annie. ‘It’s rubbish, Danny,’ Helen said when she told him.

  ‘But don’t you think we should report it to the police?’

  So Helen reported it. They reopened their file again, and then closed it again. They treated the story for exactly what it was: malicious nonsense conjured up by a troubled young girl.

  She sighed and dragged the vacuum cleaner into Annie’s room. She might as well give it a quick going-over while she was up here. Strictly speaking, the girls’ bedrooms were meant to be sacred, private spaces no one could step into without permission, but she was pretty sure Annie hadn’t run a cleaner over the carpet in the last six months.

  The room was a mess, like all teenagers’ rooms: dirty plates on the floor, stray cutlery, abandoned clothes. She started picking up the clothes and flinging them on the bed – Annie could sort out what was clean or dirty later – then piled the washing-up outside the door and plugged in the vacuum cleaner.

  She saw it when she moved the desk and then the rug from underneath it.

  A patch of dried blood on the carpet.

  She bent down and ran her fingers over it. It had hardened over the fibres, like a crust.

  For a while, she wasn’t sure what to do about it. Annie had moved her furniture around recently and here, staring Helen in the face, was the reason for it. She knew it was going to be Hope’s blood. She just knew it. Why else would Annie be hiding it like this?

  Quickly, hardly thinking about what she was doing, she rifled through the chest of drawers and the wardrobe, hunting for … for what, exactly? Clues. Whatever she could lay her hands on. Nothing. That was what she wanted to find. Absolutely nothing. Nothing at all that could incriminate Annie again in this investigation. A patch of blood on the floor didn’t mean anything.

  She found the knife in the drawer beside the bed. Plain black, small, with a steel blade – for chopping vegetables. An ordinary kitchen knife. She held it up to the light. The blade was spattered with blood.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and wondered what to do. Really, she ought to be calling the police. That was her duty, her responsibility, her job.

  But Annie hadn’t done this. She was certain of that. And the police were there now, getting the information they needed to arrest Ace Clarke. He was on the brink of being done, on the brink of being tried and then banged up for life.

  Hope was a self-harmer, everyone knew that. When it hurt, she cut, deeply and hard. There were no boundaries to that girl’s anguish, and no boundaries to her behaviour when it struck. Nothing would stop her from slashing her arms to shreds in front of others. Nothing. She revelled in the horror of it. Feel what I am feeling. It’s yours now, all this torture I cannot live with.

  That, Helen was sure, was why there was blood in Annie’s room.

  But Jesus Christ, why hadn’t Annie just said so from the beginning? Why?

  Fear, of course. She’d have been afraid of getting into trouble, of admitting that perhaps she hadn’t been very nice to Hope that night, and that she’d fall under suspicion. So, like a child, she’d tried to hide it, not realising she was powerless in this and there was no hiding anything from a police investigation. She was also, like all these children, full of the guilt about her background – even though none of it was her fault, even though she was a child and the victim in all of it.

  Helen replaced the rug over the blood, then put the knife back in the drawer where she’d found it.

  46

  Annie

  ‘Can you tell us where you were on the evening of December the twenty-fourth?’

  They’ve been alright to me so far. Earlier, I apologised for my behaviour the morning after she died, because Helen told me that would be a good idea. ‘Apologies are always hard,’ she said, ‘but you don’t want this to drag on any longer than it has to, love. Just go in, say you’re sorry, put it down to distress and tell them the truth. You’ll be out before you know it.’

  I like that about her – the fact that she believes me and has absolute faith that the police will, too. I wish she could be my appropriate adult, but she has to be at the home to answer calls and plan the funeral, so it’s Gillian again.

  I’d gi
ven them my most serious face. ‘I’m sorry about last time,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what came over me. I was…’ My voice trailed off and I shook my head. There’s not a word in the language that describes how I was feeling that day, or if there is, I haven’t heard it.

  Now, I clear my throat and answer his question slowly. ‘I was with Hope. We spent the evening at the home, then we decided to go out for a walk.’

  ‘In the Lake District, in the pitch dark?’

  ‘We had torches, and we know the area really well. We walk a lot, you see. Or we used to. We used to walk all over the place. We knew the way from the home to the lake. You just go round the tarn, then over the fell and down the other side. That was what we did. It took a few hours, but we didn’t care. Hope had some vodka. We drank it on the way.’

  ‘So the two of you, fifteen years old, walked over an icy mountain in the dark, drinking vodka?’

  ‘It wasn’t that icy. It’s a low fell. We had torches and we were careful to shine them on the path and avoid the slippery patches. Hope did fall over a few times, but she didn’t care.’

  ‘And what happened when you reached Meddleswater?’

  ‘We met Ace Clarke. He and Hope had been back in touch for a while. Her mother is in prison…’ I looked up at them uncertainly and said, ‘You know that story?’

  They both nod.

  ‘She was upset because she never heard from her. All the time she was banged up, she only wrote to her once. It used to really get to Hope. I mean, it ate away at her. The silence was really awful. She thought her mum hated her because she was the one who called the police after her sister died, and that’s what got her mum put away. She knew the only way she could find out was by talking to Ace Clarke, so she was back in touch with him. He wanted to see her, so they arranged a night when they could do it. She had to run away. The staff obviously wouldn’t have let her leave to meet him.’

  WPC Rahman nods her head a few times, like one of those bobbing dogs you get dangling from car mirrors. ‘Do you know how long they’d been back in touch? You know Ace wasn’t meant to go anywhere near Hope.’

  I shrug. ‘A while. They were in touch by email. He used a different name: David Bennet.’

  I see them glance at each other. They’ve got her iPad. They’ll have read those messages. They need to be going after him, not me. I just need to keep talking, just a little while longer, and I’ll be off the hook.

  ‘And where did you meet Ace?’

  ‘He was waiting for us in the village.’

  ‘Did you see any other people around?’

  I shake my head. ‘It was dark. Really dark. There was nobody there.’

  ‘So then what did you do?’

  ‘It was freezing by then. It had been fine while we were walking because we had thick jackets, but once we stopped, we felt the cold. Ace had a boat – I don’t know where he’d got it from, maybe it was his – and he asked if we wanted to go out in it for a while. It sounded good to us, so we agreed. He had blankets. He also had some whisky, which he shared, but I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Were you drunk, Annie?’

  I don’t know why they’re asking me this. They breathalysed me that night, so they already know. I shake my head. ‘No. I wasn’t drunk.’

  ‘Was Hope drunk?’

  ‘Yes,’ I tell them.

  The image of her, staggering drunk outside the church, her skirt trailing in the mud, floods my mind. I can’t get rid of it. I want to go back to that moment, hold her up and steer her away from what was going to happen next.

  But that was the trouble. I couldn’t hold her up, and I never had a chance of steering her away from any of this.

  47

  She’s improving, thank God. They’ve got the evidence. There’s not a lot of it, but if she tells the story properly, it’ll be enough.

  I’m watching her now, sitting pretty in that interview room, hands clasped neatly in her lap, letting the whole terrible tale fall from her mouth, and briefly I think how strange it is that those lips that expressed such love are capable of such violence.

  She knows exactly how to do this. She’s done it before, to her mother.

  48

  Helen

  After the police had told her Hope was twenty weeks pregnant, Helen went back over the log book and found that it was indeed July when she’d run away and been gone for two nights. She came back of her own accord and wouldn’t tell anyone – except Annie, presumably – where she’d been. Helen had given her a warning – one more attempt to leave, and they’d have no choice but to file for an order to send her back to a secure unit. They hired a woman from an agency to work waking nights so she couldn’t sneak out on to the fells, but to everyone’s surprise, Hope didn’t even attempt to go anywhere after that. Five months passed without drama, they let the waking-night go, and Helen dared believe that Hope was settling, that she was – well, not happy; she’d never be happy – but accepting of this life, at least.

  And then there was Annie. The mixed blessing of Hope and Annie. They kept each other stable, but equally they spurred each other on in their various forms of madness. Helen couldn’t pinpoint the beginning of their relationship, the moment they shifted from friends to more-than-friends, but it happened quickly, she was sure of that. It had always been intense between them: the surprising openness of two girls in care; sharing their histories; understanding each other; knowing the deep, deep loss of abandonment; and recognising in one another the shattered hearts they’d learned to shut away. The bond between them was deep and instant, as strong as a bolt of lightning to their cores, and then there they both were: vulnerable, exposed, each clinging to the other for survival.

  It just wasn’t meant to happen between two children in state care.

  Neither of them had ever tried to hide what was going on, although they’d never flaunted it, either. It just became slowly clearer to everyone that this quickly flourishing friendship was shot through with passion. Perhaps, Helen realised with hindsight, the reason they hadn’t tried to hide it was because they didn’t fully understand what was going on themselves. They were fifteen, each falling suddenly and unexpectedly in love with someone of the same sex. By the time they realised they ought to hide it, it was too late. Everyone knew.

  It was Clare who’d found them together the first time. She’d gone upstairs to wake them so they’d be ready for their lessons with the home’s teacher when she arrived, and Hope wasn’t in her room. She found them together in Annie’s room, sleeping in her bed, limbs entwined, their faces so close they were almost kissing.

  Discreetly, Clare had come away and reported what she’d seen to Helen.

  Helen sighed. ‘We can’t be seen to condone this,’ she said.

  Clare said, ‘Dear God, no.’

  Helen looked at her pointedly. She’d detected shock and disgust in Clare’s tone and wasn’t going to indulge homophobia. ‘It’s nothing to do with them both being female,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with them being underage. It’s not appropriate in a children’s home. We’ll have to tell them that.’

  ‘But … can we stop them?’

  ‘They’re fifteen. If they’re determined to be together, they will do it, but we need to make it clear that it isn’t acceptable. I’ll have to let management know, and we’ll have to log what you’ve seen and anything else that goes on in future.’

  Clare nodded.

  ‘But now they need to get up.’

  Later on, Helen had called the girls to the office. ‘No one minds you being together,’ she said. ‘That’s fine. But underage sex is underage sex and if it goes on under this roof, you will have to be separated.’

  ‘Fuck that,’ Hope said. ‘We’ll run away. You can’t stop us.’

  That, pretty much, was the extent of every dialogue Helen had with them over the following few months. She kept management informed and they monitored what was going on, as far as they could, but in the end, Helen’s judgement was that this relationship did t
he girls more good than it did them harm. There was no risk of pregnancy. There was no imbalance of power, no abuse, no sense that anyone was taking advantage of someone too young to consent. It was love. Helen could see that. Anyone could see that. They’d been cast adrift in the world and become one another’s anchor, the heft of their experiences holding each of them steady.

  It only did them harm when they were threatened with the loss of it.

  And now Hope was dead. And Annie was involved, and Ace Clarke was involved, and there’d been a pregnancy Helen hadn’t known about, and so many missing pieces of the puzzle it was wrecking her head trying to work it all out. Had Annie known? Had Annie known Hope was sleeping with Ace? She must have done. She told the police she’d known about the baby. She said they’d wanted to run away, to be together, the two of them and the child. But Helen couldn’t for the life of her work out what their plan had been, or how Ace had been there that night, or how Annie had agreed to this whole crazy affair. She knew Annie hated him just as much as she did.

  But Annie would have agreed to anything Hope wanted.

  ‘We’ll kill ourselves,’ Hope told them, a few days after being told they were going to be separated. ‘We’ll kill ourselves if you won’t let us be together.’

  Helen knew to take this sort of talk seriously, however extravagant it seemed. But she hadn’t killed herself. All the evidence suggested Ace Clarke had killed her because she was pregnant with his child. And Annie had witnessed it all and done nothing to try and stop it.

  Finally, just after four o’clock, Gillian phoned from the station. ‘We’re just leaving now.’