The Final Child

by Fran Dorricott

  Wendy pulled back, sympathy morphing her face.

  “Sure,” she said. “That’s fine. We can talk again some other time when you’ve had chance to process. I’ve no doubt the police will be in touch soon about last night anyway.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about how I needed to talk to somebody else. Somebody who wouldn’t try to be my friend.

  I needed to speak to Harriet Murphy.

  SEVEN

  5 NOVEMBER 2016

  Harriet

  THE MOON WAS JUST rising when I pulled into the car park of a pub in Arkney town centre. It wasn’t a place I’d been to before but I’d driven past it enough times, and it was somewhere between Jillian’s house and mine – how funny, I thought, that we’d ended up living in the same town. This place was a chain pub; although it was quaint from the outside, perfectly matching the surrounding area with its uneven beige stone walls and peaked roof, inside it was inconspicuous and busy, gaudy carpets and beer stains and all.

  I’d been surprised when Jillian called me this afternoon. She’d sounded tightly wound. I was meant to be having dinner with Mum tonight but I couldn’t ignore the desperation in her voice. The memorial was tomorrow, but clearly whatever Jillian wanted to talk about couldn’t wait.

  The pub was crowded, as I’d thought it might be, filled with young families, the children running around bundled in hats and scarves to ward off the chill night air. Out back I heard the fizz and pop of distant Bonfire Night fireworks.

  I headed for the bar, ordered myself a large soda and lime. Then I turned to survey the tables and booths, feeling nervous again.

  Jillian – Erin – was already here. I spotted her almost immediately, tucked away in a corner booth and boring holes right into my skull. I took another sip and then headed to her table.

  She looked tired. Nervous. Her blonde hair was plaited back from her pale face, and her dark eyeliner was bolder than I’d seen it before, perhaps to distract from the circles under her eyes.

  “Erin,” I said, forcing myself to use her name. She wasn’t Jillian any more. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “You took your time,” she said by way of greeting, but she gave me a shaky smile.

  I climbed into the booth. Our knees knocked together and I spilled my drink, a puddle forming in the centre of the table.

  “Shit,” I said, wiping the spill. “I’m sorry. I came as soon as I could.”

  “Yeah, well… Thanks. I know it was last-minute.”

  We looked at each other. Erin’s eyes were startlingly blue but hooded, as though she wasn’t giving me her full attention. I took a deep breath.

  “What happened?”

  Erin bristled.

  “I don’t mean to pry. It’s just… on the phone you sounded a bit shaken up.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it yet.” Erin shrugged. She sipped at her own drink – it looked like Coke, maybe rum or whisky too, though she was probably driving – and held her hands tightly around the glass as though she was trying to stop them from trembling. “You said you wanted to talk to me about this book you’re writing. Well, go on then.”

  I shook my head. “Look, let me be honest first. I’m not a journalist. I’m not even really a writer. I haven’t got a contract or a publishing deal. I have a day job, I work in insurance – somehow they’ve not fired me yet. I am dedicated to this book, though. It’s important to me. I just wanted to throw that out there before we got into anything. But… off the record, I do want to ask – is something going on?”

  Erin didn’t reply, but she didn’t flinch away from me either.

  “Alright,” I said. “You obviously don’t have to talk to me, but I think this will work better if we’re both honest with each other. You invited me here.”

  She didn’t answer. I regrouped. “The book…”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s meant to be, well…” I’d been working on my pitch for this project, honing it so that I could explain it again to the parents I had plans to re-interview, but at the sight of Erin’s faintly hopeful face my words got jumbled. “It’s about you. Them.”

  “Them?” Erin shifted. Mechanical. “The… children. Alex?”

  “Alex, too.” I nodded. “It’s meant to be this… sort of a celebration of life. Like, aren’t you sick of the world only seeing the man who hurt your family? I want to write about their lives, not just their deaths. I want this book to show the world who they all were. And who you were, and are.”

  I could see that Erin knew what I meant. I didn’t have to explain to her about the countless lists on the internet of ‘most notorious serial killers’ or ‘top ten unsolvable crimes’. This case was still everywhere, but all they ever cared about was him. The Father. Not about the lives he destroyed. Those were just footnotes.

  “Why do you need me?” Erin asked.

  “You are one of them.” I said this simply, but as carefully as I could. “You deserve this just as much as they do, not least because of how brave you’ve been, because of how you survived.”

  “Survived?” Erin’s face blanched, whether with anger or fear I couldn’t tell.

  I forged on, cursing myself inwardly, “As for why now – that’s on me. For a long time, writing has been the only way I’ve been able to process things, my own family’s loss. Losing my cousins made me want to do something. I started writing this book about the children the Father had hurt as a way to deal with that pain, that loss. I grew up knowing more about the theories around the abductions than I knew about the children he’d hurt. And I’m sure it was the same for you—”

  Erin lunged. She was leaning halfway over the table before I’d even realised I’d upset her.

  “You’re doing this out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness?” she hissed. “You think just because you’re related to them that you have any right to tell my story?”

  My hands went clammy. “It’s not like that. I want to help.”

  “Help?”

  “It’s not just the book,” I said quickly. “It’s – this, too. Why we’re here. You called me, remember? I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  Erin sank back into her seat, glancing around us.

  “Something is going on with you, isn’t it?” I said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something did,” I pressed.

  Erin’s expression didn’t change but she made no move to leave either. Her eyes sparkled with what might have been the beginnings of tears but her lips were resolute – it was a look more akin to fear than anger. I felt my skin prickle again.

  “It’s nothing,” she said. “Just… it doesn’t matter. I’ve been having this feeling, recently. Like somebody is watching me. But there’s never anybody there. I convinced myself it was all in my head, because of the anniversary. And then… last night, I got home, and somebody had broken into my house. Or, maybe they didn’t. I don’t know. I thought somebody had but I’ve calmed down since then. The police came and nothing was missing…”

  “Oh, god, Erin. I’m sorry. Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I just thought that talking to you might be – helpful. That you might know more than me. That maybe it’s because I’m winding myself up, you know, and maybe I could do with learning more, opening up more. To somebody impartial. Sort of.”

  “Erin… if you’re ready to talk to me, I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  “Everything?” she asked.

  “Yes. If somebody broke into your house—”

  “Somebody did break into my house.”

  “If somebody broke into your house,” I continued, “do you think it’s a possibility that it’s connected to who you are?”

  “Well, yeah, I guess…” she said. “But why would it be? It seems a bit extreme for even the most crazed theorists, and mostly I get left alone now the Father’s dead.”

  The conviction on Erin’s face was startling. I had th
eories about what had happened to stop the abductions, but never anything concrete. Maybe prison, or death in prison, but I wouldn’t swear to either. Erin, though, seemed sure about this.

  “I’m not saying it’s definitely connected,” I said. “But it’s probably a good idea for you to have as much information as you can get, right?”

  Erin drained the last of the Coke and rattled the ice cubes thoughtfully.

  “Okay,” she said. We had reached some kind of truce. She leaned back. “So tell me… what did you say to make my mum freak out the other day?”

  I steeled myself for her reaction.

  “I didn’t really get far enough to tell her anything, but I wanted to say that the police might have a reason to look into certain things in your case. Because I told them that I don’t think my cousins were the Father’s first victims.”

  It wasn’t exactly how I’d wanted to tell her, but there wasn’t ever going to be a right time. And now that the words were out in the open I felt instantly lighter. But with the swooping sense of relief also came the other thought, louder now: what if I was wrong? And what did it mean if I was right?

  “What the hell do you mean, not his first victims?”

  “It’s – a hunch. But, look. Everybody thinks Mikey and Jem started this whole thing. They were the first recorded pair of siblings to disappear with the Father’s M.O., right? Siblings, the bigger ones small for their age, taken from their shared bedroom in the middle of the night, the window left open, their bodies later found injected with insulin, dressed in pyjamas that weren’t their own… My aunt and uncle are asked constantly if they knew anybody who would have wanted to hurt the boys, because with abductions of children it’s usually somebody the children know. But everything felt so practised. No evidence left behind. Like he’d spent a long time planning. Or maybe it wasn’t the first abduction.”

  “Right…?”

  “Well, I found something that might be connected. I found an article, just by chance, about this pair of runaways from Derby. In 1993 two boys went missing from a foster home – that’s a year before my cousins were taken. At first I didn’t think anything of it, because there are so many differences, and they didn’t even have the same surname. They ended up at the same foster home six months apart. They were from Birmingham and Manchester originally but they were absolutely inseparable once they found each other. The foster mother was caring for a few other kids at the time and she said these two had been a bit of a problem. Once they were together they misbehaved, got suspended from school for skiving, mouthing off at teachers, that sort of thing. Nothing serious but the school came down on them hard.

  “A while later they disappeared in the middle of the night. Just upped and left. The foster mother didn’t notice anything strange before they left – in fact they seemed quite happy to be out of school – but they’d run away from foster homes before, and even made it to various cities before they were found, so nobody suspected it was going to be different this time. The older boy ran away three or four times at various points before this, and I think the younger one ran away from his previous foster home after a fight at school with an older boy.

  “They were last seen hanging around outside a bus station on the Staffordshire border, but nobody ever confirmed where they were headed because if they bought tickets it was with cash and the cameras never caught them getting on a bus, although they could have left on foot through one of the blind spots. They were flagged as high risk at the time. So they weren’t taken from their bedroom, but they were never found so I can’t count out other similarities.”

  I saw the gears turning in Erin’s mind. I lifted my chin, waiting for her to look at me again.

  “Why do you think they’re connected?” she asked eventually. “If the boys weren’t actually related to each other, and there are so many differences—”

  “I don’t think that’s the point,” I said quickly.

  “What is the point then?”

  “They were still siblings,” I said. “In all but blood, anyway. The older one small for his age like all of the Father’s victims. They were thick as thieves, so as good as brothers even if not biologically. Their bodies weren’t found but a lot of the Father’s victims weren’t found. It’s almost like… an earlier, untested version of the same pattern.

  “The children were too young to have disappeared that easily by themselves. When kids go missing at that age – wilfully – they’re usually found. These boys had been found within hours when they’d run away before, separately.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Nine and six.”

  “And nobody ever connected them to the Father before?” she asked. I was surprised that she looked less afraid than she had earlier, that steeliness back in her gaze.

  “No,” I said. “Even I wouldn’t, except I have a feeling. I don’t know. The location, and the fact that both boys went missing at the same time and neither was ever found…”

  Erin twitched.

  “I think the police will look into it in any case,” I said. “And that could change things, couldn’t it?”

  EIGHT

  Erin

  I WATCHED HARRIET LEAVE and tried to keep it together. I’d thought talking to her would help but it hadn’t. It was like the world I’d built was crumbling to the foundations. I didn’t know what to believe. Harriet had wavered between conviction and insisting that it was just a hunch. But there was an intensity to her I couldn’t shake; it was like the first numbing drop of alcohol – it made me want more, to know more, to understand. And that was something I’d never wanted before.

  Once she left I stumbled outside into the beer garden where the fireworks had just finished. The sky was thick with smoke and tinged orange by the bonfire. It looked like hell on Earth, the air speckled with ash and stars.

  I stood underneath the overhang of a large oak tree and inhaled the scents of frying onions and candyfloss. I’d only had one drink and yet somehow I felt as if I’d had ten. What Harriet had told me, about those missing boys, it swirled in my head. Round and round and round… It wasn’t the reassurance I’d been hoping for. What had I even hoped to achieve?

  I folded my hands under my armpits to ward off the cold, regretting that I didn’t own any decent winter boots. I thought about the book Harriet was writing, all of the interviews she’d probably done. Was I ready to get involved with all of that?

  I could just keep on as I was, going to the office, chatting with colleagues, making candles in my spare time – but would I be able to ignore it now? Now that I’d realised that’s what I’d been doing. Ignoring it, not moving on. Not really.

  No matter what had really happened last night, this spooked feeling that I couldn’t shake was real enough. I’d spent so many years avoiding the truth that it had become like a ghost. It haunted me. I needed to know what had happened to me. I needed to remember.

  But what if I was wrong about Harriet? How did I know that I wasn’t just a meal ticket to her?

  The truth was, I didn’t know. But it didn’t feel that way. When she looked at me, it was like she was seeing me. I wasn’t just a victim with a capital V. Nobody who knew my past had looked at me that way in a long time. She didn’t just pity me, and she wasn’t crazy either. Even when she talked about those missing children, it wasn’t with the same fervour I’d seen from the crazies on the internet or my ex-colleague Jeff. Not like the people who had built entire websites around theories that the Father was still alive and living in rural Perthshire, that he was in prison in America for trying to start a cult, that he was a time-traveller…

  It was part of the reason I’d ignored it all. The information that was in the newspapers, their best guess of what happened to me during the weeks I’d been gone. I didn’t look for information on the other children, the other victims. It was all just guesswork anyway.

  As a teenager I hadn’t been interested in learning about the other children, not even when my mother paid for therapist af
ter therapist so I’d have somebody to talk to. I didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t want to read about it. In fact, I was so actively not interested that any mention of the Father or his victims produced bouts of impossible sickness that had me hanging my head between my knees.

  In recent years he had popped up on most of those ‘Top Ten Creepiest Unsolved Crimes’ lists on Facebook and Buzzfeed, and I’d avoided those too. I didn’t want to risk seeing Alex’s face staring out at me, forever my big brother, but now frozen as a child. Worse, I didn’t want to see my own face, the me that wasn’t me any more.

  About a year ago I decided to open one of the lists. I was surprised by the amount of information I’d managed to absorb even without trying, but it was probably inevitable considering the scale of the investigation.

  Twelve children stolen over five years. Always in pairs, always siblings.

  Gender and race varied, although he took more boys in the beginning. The children were from all over the Midlands and the North, ranging from four to nine years old. A few true crime nuts focused on the fact that most of the places were right off the motorway – but that didn’t mean a whole lot considering the ground covered.

  Sometimes their bodies turned up. Sometimes they didn’t. The bodies that were recovered had been found with extremely high levels of insulin, leading the police to believe that he injected them with the overdose to kill them. Some of the internet nuts linked this to the Beverley Allitt case in 1991, where a woman had murdered four children and attempted to kill more still. But there was no more to connect the Father’s victims to Beverley Allitt than there was to link them to Harold Shipman. It was all just wild conjecture.

  That hadn’t stopped the crazies from suggesting everything from the Father being a disgruntled male nurse to him being a cult leader, though.

  It wasn’t the manner of death that haunted me so much as the period between abduction and death. Like what happened to Morgan Bailey, whose body was found almost an entire year after her abduction, yet she’d only recently been killed. She’d been alive all that time.