‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know. It’s not what I want. Of course it’s not what I fucking want.’
And then suddenly I was crying. I never cried. Never.
She put her arms around me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘It will be alright.’
I pulled away from her. ‘It won’t be alright,’ I said. ‘That’s one thing I am sure of. This will never be alright. I’m fifteen and I’m pregnant with a pimp’s child. I have two choices here. I either run away and live with the pimp and take all his money and bring the kid up to be…’ I looked down at myself, ‘like this. Or I tell Helen and she’ll tell social services, and they’ll whip the kid off me after five minutes, and it’ll grow up with a load of bastard foster parents and I’ll die from the loss of it. That’s it, Annie. Those are my options.’
51
Annie
Helen says I need to rest now, and recover from my ordeal. I suppose she’s right, but sleep is impossible. She haunts my dreams as much as she haunts my thoughts in the day. Always, I can see her in those last few months, when everything started going wrong for us and I couldn’t reach her, no matter how hard I tried.
I never wanted her to die.
She was pregnant, and I couldn’t get over it, and I handled it all wrong. In some distant, rational part of my brain, I could see this might have been our chance. Hope loved children. ‘It’s the only thing I’m any good at,’ she told me. ‘I can’t add up, or write very well, but I can look after a baby. I was at my best when I had Jade to care for. I wish you could have seen me then.’
The promise of a child of her own was all she needed to end her love affair with death. But it was Ace’s, and she’d conceived when the two of us were together and she’d run away from me, and I was devastated, and however hard I tried, I couldn’t stop being devastated.
We couldn’t talk about anything at the home. She didn’t want the staff to find out, so nearly every day now, we trudged out over the fells so we could work things out away from the listening ears of those who were in charge of us. As we walked, we sweltered in the August heat. Summer had dried the waterfall in the hills behind the home, so we spent our afternoons lying against the sun-warmed rocks, wishing the rain would come and return our pool to us.
She said, ‘I can’t get rid of it. You know that, don’t you?’
I nodded. I knew it.
‘So I have to keep it.’
‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can you keep it?’
She shrugged. ‘He’s got money, Annie. He can just give us money, and you and I could live together and bring it up, like a family.’
I took a deep breath before I spoke. Then I said, ‘I don’t want to.’
She turned to me, shocked. ‘What?’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said again. ‘I don’t want to look after that man’s child. I don’t want him in my life. I don’t want him in your life.’ I could feel the heat rising in my voice, but couldn’t stop it. ‘I want you to stop seeing him.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Of course you bloody can. I thought … I thought…’ I stumbled for a moment. ‘I thought you wanted to be with me,’ I finished.
‘I do.’
‘You can’t be with me and keep running off with someone else.’
She fell silent and looked away from me, and it was at the moment I suddenly understood what she wanted. She thought she could have us both. She thought Ace Clarke would provide her with the money she needed for the child, and I’d be her devoted wife, helping her bring up his baby in her crazy idea of domestic bliss. But always, I knew, she’d be repaying Ace, as trapped and ill as her mother had been.
I said, ‘You’re not stupid, Hope. You know this can’t work. If you want to be with me, you have to let Ace go.’
52
I’ve been watching her from the beginning. It’s a risky game, but she’s winning, and I can’t help being proud of her. The police have got the evidence from the coroner. There’s not a lot of it: I was drunk, I was pregnant; I shagged Ace Clarke and I drowned. And at some point, Annie was there.
She’s done it, though. She’s given them the story that fits with the evidence and will nail Ace Clarke. Muzna’s in her office now with Emma, playing her the tape of Annie’s interviews, showing her the case they’ve got to arrest him.
I hear her voice fill the room again, the sweet voice that used to tell me over and over that she loved me. But not enough, I keep saying to her now. Not quite enough, you murderess. It drives her mad when I say things like that. She thinks she’s losing her mind, just like her mother before her.
‘Christmas is a hard time when you’ve got no family,’ she’s saying. ‘You know what everyone else will be doing on Christmas Eve – staying up late, watching films, getting presents under the tree and everything. We had none of that. So late on Christmas Eve, we decided to go for a walk…’
The police seemed to accept that there was no real purpose to it. We were just unhappy and reckless, and lacked any desire to keep ourselves safe.
‘We met Ace Clarke in the village by the church. He and Hope disappeared for a while, then when they returned he took us out on the lake in a stolen boat. Hope by then was so drunk she could hardly walk and fell overboard, and Ace refused to save her. She was too drunk to swim, the water was freezing and she was dead within minutes.’
‘Did she definitely fall?’ Muzna asked. ‘Or was she pushed?’
Annie paused. ‘I wasn’t watching. I couldn’t tell for sure.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘I screamed. I said, “You have to save her.” He refused. He said, “I’m not getting in there. We’ll both die.”’
‘Did you think about saving her?’
‘Yes. I wanted to, but it was so cold and dark and I couldn’t see her. Ace said that if I jumped in, I’d be killed, and I wasn’t strong enough to pull her back. But then he started panicking and crying, and saying we had to find her. So we shone our torches until after a while we saw her close by in the water, and he managed to pull her back in, but it was too late. She was dead.’
‘And then what did you do?’
‘Ace rowed us to shore. He dragged her body out and then he took off his jumper and jacket and gave them to me, and then he just ran.’
‘And so you spent the rest of the night beside the body?’
‘I couldn’t think of anything else to do. There was no one around, and I wasn’t sure where I was, and I didn’t want to leave her.’
Muzna turns the tape off and looks at Emma. ‘I accept I was probably wrong,’ she says. ‘We’ve let her go without charge. She’s told us what she says she knows, none of it conflicts with the evidence – the small amount that we’ve got – and the finger is starting to point quite clearly at this Ace Clarke. Sounds like a nasty piece of work.’
She reaches for some papers on her desk and hands them to Emma. ‘The semen in her body was his, and the foetal DNA test has come back. The baby Hope was carrying was definitely his too, as Annie told us. So there’s a motive for you right there. He wouldn’t want to be responsible for a child’s pregnancy. Helen at the home gave us Hope’s files with all her history in them. This man has been a feature of her life since she was born.’
‘But,’ Emma begins, naïve in the face of all Muzna’s experience, ‘wouldn’t social services have kept him away from her, once she’d been removed from her mother’s care?’
Muzna shrugs. ‘It depends. I’ll need to talk to Helen again, but Hope’s relationship with him was complicated. She enjoyed all the money he lavished on her. It’s possible she loved him. Certainly, he was the only link between her and her mother, and she used to run away a lot to be with him.’
‘But how?’ Emma asked, incredulous. ‘How could she run away from a home where she was meant to be kept safe?’
‘It’s not a secure unit, Emma. There are no locks on the windows, and the walls aren’t high. All she had to do was shimmy down one and find her way to the
main road, where he could pick her up. It says here she absconded for two nights in July. She was on her last warning. One more attempt to leave and she’d be back in a secure unit. She made no further attempts to run away after that, but Annie has told us she used to disappear for a few hours during the day sometimes, to be with him. She was pregnant with his child. It’s my suspicion that was what she really wanted.’
‘To be pregnant?’
‘Certainly. She was desperate to be a mother. From what I can gather from these notes and my conversations with Helen, she’d pretty much been bringing up her baby sister single-handed while her mother lived her life on the lash. She never got over…’
‘I see,’ Emma says. ‘Then we need to set about finding Ace Clarke and bringing him in.’
‘We’re on top of that. The only trouble is, when we checked Hope’s iPad, she’d been googling easy ways to commit suicide.’
‘Drowning isn’t an easy way to kill yourself.’
‘It’s easy enough when you’re as pissed as she was. But we’ve tracked Ace Clarke down, and that’s where we need to start. He runs a known brothel. The police have always turned a blind eye. They had no idea there was an underage girl on his books. A child. She was thirteen when she started working for him. Thirteen,’ she repeats, as if it is unthinkable. ‘I want us to nail this disgusting piece of work. Tonight. We’ll storm that building and arrest him. If we want to do him for murder we have to show that he intentionally took Hope out on the lake while she was out of her head on booze – booze he’d given her – and that he then drowned her. If we can’t prove that, we can at least get him for manslaughter: he knew there was a high chance of an accident and when it happened he made no attempt to save her. And if he wriggles his way out of that, we’ve got the fact that he had sex with her shortly before she died. She was fifteen years old. He is forty-six. We’ve got him in a corner, Emma, and not before time.’
I keep watching them, for hours, willing them to just go ahead and arrest him. But they’re thorough and they have things to do first. They’re setting traps for him to fall into. They hate him. They want to make it impossible for him to get away.
It’s true I used to love him. I couldn’t help it. I was young, and my mother was useless, and he was the only adult who ever showed any kind of interest in me. Even now, I am convinced he loved me and my mother. He did. But his version of love was toxic and damaging. I always sensed that, of course I did, but it was Annie who made me realise it, coming to me with her own variety of love, so selfless and caring and good. I suppose that was the difference between them, in the end. She was good, and he was bad, and they loved in the style of who they were.
I don’t know where I fell on the goodness scale. Maybe I’d been contaminated and would have been washed clean by the end, or maybe I was just mad. It doesn’t really matter now. I’m out of there.
It’s Muzna and Graham who go to arrest him. Once they are confident about the evidence and how they are going to bring him down, they drive together in a police car all the way to 5 Crescent Avenue, the place where he squandered my life.
He did squander my life, I knew that. I knew it as clearly as I knew night from day. He abused me and damaged me, and I should have loved the chance to get away from him, to triumph over him and say, ‘No more.’ But it was never that simple. Never. He was all I’d ever known, and I knew – because the therapists all told me – that I’d been formed by him. Ace Clarke was a part of me, as familiar as home. And he left me feeling torn, and even though my head said I needed to get away from him, my heart could never do it.
When I stayed with him in the summer – that weekend I conceived the child – we’d lain together in bed, and he’d run his fingers through my hair and said, ‘Can I visit you after you’ve gone?’
I said, ‘They’ll never let you.’
‘They needn’t know. I can drive over, meet you in town somewhere.’
I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’
He said, ‘I love you, Hope. I want to keep seeing you. I can offer you a home when you’re sixteen, when you finally get out of that place.’
I thought of Annie. If she could see me now, it would break her heart.
He said, quite casually, ‘Are there any other girls living there?’
‘Annie,’ I told him, and I heard my voice crack over the name. ‘And Lara.’
‘How old are they?’
‘Annie’s fifteen. Lara’s twelve.’
‘Can I meet them?’
I looked at him. ‘Why?’
He said, ‘I can help them.’
A dull feeling of sickness swelled inside me then, as I came to understand exactly what his plan was. He wanted to take Annie and turn her into a sex worker, make her completely dependent on him, just as he’d done with my mother. And Lara…
I shook my head. ‘No, Ace,’ I said. ‘You can’t meet them.’
‘Nice town,’ Muzna says, gazing admiringly out of the windows at the grey winter sea and the promenade with its bandstand and manicured lawns. Everything is sedate and peaceful here, and even 5 Crescent Avenue looks like any other seafront home: tall, white, imposing. There is nothing to even hint at what went on inside.
Muzna and Graham stride purposefully up the stone steps to the front door and knock loudly. It is an authoritative, ‘this is serious’ knock, not the gentle knock they use when they are coming to break bad news.
After a moment or two, the door opens and Ace stands before them, tall and broad-shouldered and still far too good-looking to be truly evil, I think.
‘Ace Clarke?’ Graham asks.
He looks from Graham to Muzna and back again. ‘What’s this about?’ he asks.
‘We’re arresting you on suspicion of murdering Hope Lacey. You do not need to say anything, but anything you do say that you later come to rely on in court…’
‘Murder?’ he says, eyes wide with innocence. ‘Hope … Hope is dead?’
You have to hand it to him. He’s doing a good job of sounding shocked.
‘She is indeed,’ she tells him. ‘Now, you need to come with us to the police station to discuss any role you might have played in this.’
‘I didn’t … I had no idea…’ His voice trails off and he breaks down in tears. It’s hard to tell if he is genuine or not.
53
Hope
She used to tell me I was addicted to him. To Ace, I mean. ‘He’s destroying you, Hope,’ she’d say. ‘He’s already destroyed you, and you know that, but you can’t give him up.’
She was right. In my head, it was clear. I knew what he’d done, and how he’d harmed me and destroyed me, body and soul, and then built his wealth on the wreckage. Of course I knew that. But he was Ace, and he’d loved me all my life and cared for me when my mother couldn’t, and even though he was damaging, he was also comforting and familiar. I remembered the way our problems eased the minute he walked through the door; I remembered his generosity; his tenderness when he stroked my hair and said, ‘There is no one in the world more beautiful than you, Hope.’
Annie’s love was different. Purer, I suppose, but naïve. There were things about me she could never understand. All I ever wanted was to have my family back, and if I let Ace go, I would never have it. He was my family, in lots of ways. It was alright for her. She never wanted her mother.
Somewhere towards the end of October, Helen came into the living room just after lunch, while Annie and I were in the middle of a dance-off on the Wii. It was ancient, that Wii, but they didn’t have enough money to upgrade to anything more recent. Lara was in her usual place – curled up between the fireplace and the bookshelf full of books no one ever read, her knees against her chest, her head on her knees.
Helen said, ‘Could you turn that off for a minute, girls?’
‘No,’ I said, without looking at her. ‘We’re halfway through and I’m winning.’ The song was some old thing by Shakira and the dance probably too sexy to be doing in front of Lara, but it wasn’t lik
e she was watching us.
Helen waited patiently until it finished, then said, ‘Right, girls. Wii off now, please. I need to talk to each of you, privately, in my office. There’s nothing to worry about. In fact, it’s good news. Who’s coming first?’
Before I could say anything, Annie chucked the remote control on the sofa and said, ‘I don’t mind.’
Helen smiled at her. ‘Thanks, love,’ she said, and the two of them left the room.
I took myself over to where Lara was and sat against the wall, facing away from her so I wouldn’t be too intimidating. I knew she’d have heard what Helen just said. She always heard everything and knew exactly what was going on all the time, even though she pretended not to. She was a kid on high alert. Her feelers were always out, testing the air for the next threat of harm she’d need to run from. She wasn’t a fighter. She was a fleer. You couldn’t blame her for that.
I hadn’t had a lot of luck with her, I admit. I’d tried to be her friend because I thought she could do with one, with someone who understood her. I knew, obviously, that I could never really understand what it was like to be six years old and witness your father murder your mother, but I’d seen other horrors. I reckoned I had a better chance of reaching her than any of those idiot foster parents who, when all was said and done, really just wanted a baby of their own and not someone else’s cast-off.
I’d started out by just going into her room and trying to begin a conversation. I didn’t bother easing my way in with small talk. It was something I didn’t have a clue about – all that, ‘What’s your favourite this, that and the other?’ stuff. I just sat cross-legged on her floor and cut straight to the heart of things.
The first day, she was sitting at her window, gazing out at the view, like old people do when they’ve lost their minds. She hadn’t looked at me when I walked in, although I knew she was aware of me from the way she flinched and then didn’t loosen up again.
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