Page 38 of Good Bad Girl

“Do you deny taking the war medals that we found under your bed?”

“I confess I took the medals but I was going to give them back. Joy did see me but—”

“But then you killed her.”

“No!”

“Putting the body in a broken elevator meant nobody found her for a few hours, but we’re still able to tell roughly when she died and it was around the time she came to find you. Nobody saw her after that. She died as a result of a blunt force trauma to the skull, we know that much, but what did you hit her with? And why did you drag her lifeless body to the elevator and put an out-of-order sign around her neck?” She pauses as though expecting me to speak but I have no words. I don’t even react to what she just said because I don’t know how to. “Where is the murder weapon?”

“I don’t know,” I say. It’s the truth but she continues to stare at me. “I didn’t murder anyone. Nobody said anything aboutmurderwhen I was arrested.”

“Sorry about that, strictly speaking I should have, but I was waiting for some tests to come back. It’s amazing what the forensics team can do these days. The clues they can find at a scene that prove who did what. So that it really doesn’t matter whether someone is or isn’t a good liar: the evidence tells us everything we need to know. I think I’ve already wasted too much time on you. Any questions?”

“Don’t I get a phone call?”

“That’s a good question. Yes, you do. My turn to ask a question. Why did you do it?”

I remember the text telling me not to say a word and don’t answer. She doesn’t believe anything I say anyway. I’m tired of trying to defend myself and I’ve probably already said more than I should have. DCI Chapman nods as though she can read my mind and for a moment I am scared that maybe she can. She sighs and shakes her head.

“You’re so young. You have your whole life ahead of you. If you tell me the truth about what happened, maybe you won’t have to spend it all in jail.” I still don’t say anything but I do start to cry. “Okay, have it your way. Between us, you should ask about legal representation because you’re going to need it. You haven’t been formally charged yet, but you’re going to be. I do have one last question for now: your name. It’s not really your name is it? That’s why it took a little while for us to process you, because thereisn’tanyone named Patience Liddell with your date of birth. We can check these things nowadays, you see. So, who are you? Really?”

I could confirm that Patienceisn’tmy real name, and that I chose the surname Liddell because of Alice Liddell, the real Alice in Wonderland. It was my favorite book as a child—the one I asked my mother to read to me before I could read it for myself. But why should I help this woman who has already made up her mind about me?

I dry my tears. “I’d like to make that phone call.”

Frankie

Frankie has texted her daughter back ten times already but there is no reply. According to her own phone, the messages haven’t even been read. She must have dialed Nellie’s number fifty times but it goes straight to voice mail. And it is just a generic recording, not her daughter’s voice, a sound she misses so much. She keeps wondering if she imagined receiving the text but it’s still there, every time she checks: HELP ME MUM.

Frankie has a pain in her chest and feels as though she can’t breathe. She remembers this feeling. The first time her daughter disappeared—in a supermarket of all places—she was still so small. It doesn’t matter that she is eighteen years old now; the sense of panic and the overwhelming fear feel exactly the same. Frankie’s little girl needs her and she doesn’t even know where to start looking. She puts some cash on the table for the breakfast she no longer has an appetite for, then leaves the café. She hurries back to the van—twenty-four steps—and sees a yellow parking ticket on the windscreen. She snatches it, stuffs it inside her bag, and looks upjust in time to see them: the owner of the galleryandthe woman from the pink house. Together. Standing in front of a narrow alleyway.

They walk toward the gallery and Frankie sees that the sign on the door still saysClosed, even though it is now late morning. Jude Kennedy checks that the door is locked, then he walks away down the cobbled street toward Trafalgar Square. The woman in the pink house walks away in the opposite direction. They don’t hug or say goodbye to each other. They look like strangers and the whole scene seems a little off, so Frankie decides to investigate the alley they just emerged from for herself.

Covent Garden is heaving with tourists and shoppers, but life has taught her that people are generally too preoccupied with themselves to notice what someone else is or isn’t doing. There are forty-eight steps from the van to the alleyway. At first, it looks like there is nothing there—just some bins and cardboard boxes left out for recycling—but then she spots the door at the side of the building.

Picking locks is surprisingly easy. It’s one of the first things an inmate at HMP Crossroads taught her to do. Lazy Jane—as she liked to be known—was genuinely shocked by how much Frankie once paid a locksmith when she lost her door keys. Jane—who was a workaholic on the outside and inside, not lazy at all—taught her enough so that she’d never need a man to unlock a door again. Modern locks are a little more tricky, but the basic kind, the variety you’ll find on most doors, are simple to open when you know how. Frankie has a tool on her key ring and she’s inside in less than thirty seconds.

The view that greets her is disappointing, just stairs. A lot of them. One hundred and twenty-three steps in total, she discovers when she reaches the top. Then there is another door, which means another lock to pick. She pushes the second door open and gasps. There is an unframed papercut of a fox on the wall, herdaughter was here, she’s sure of it. Frankie rushes to the bed and lifts the pillow to her face, it still smells ofher. Nellie was probably in this room when Frankie was downstairs in the gallery earlier. The owner lied to her, not that she should be surprised. The Kennedys are a family full of liars.

She looks around slowly, as though scared of what else she might find. She recognizes some of the clothes on the rail and touches them to make sure they are real. There are other familiar items on the bed, including the Japanese tea tin Frankie used to keep their emergency money in. She checks inside but the tin is empty. The whole place has a strange feeling and it looks as though someone left in a hurry. Then she sees the art portfolio leaning against the wall. She unzips it and cries when she sees one papercut after another, her daughter made all of them, she is sure of it.

Frankie feels helpless as she stands in the middle of the abandoned attic. The love between a mother and daughter is like a contract signed with invisible ink, but the terms and conditions do vary. Everybody has a mother, but not everybody has a mother’s love. Frankie will always love her daughter, no matter what. That’s what she signed up to do. To have been this close to getting her back and to have somehow missed her is devastating. She doesn’t know what to do now, or where to look, or how to find her.

Buttheyknow.

And Frankie knows how to find them.

She takes her daughter’s art and runs back down the stairs—all one hundred and twenty-three of them—then hurries to the van. Frankie is going to pay the woman in the pink house another visit, and this time she isn’t going to bother making an appointment.

Clio

Keeping busy keeps Clio safe from her own thoughts. Having too much time to think, to feel, to remember is dangerous. Normally there would be clients to see and to listen to, to try to help, but she canceled all of her appointments today. As a result, the house is too quiet and her own thoughts and fears are too loud. She needs the noise of someone else’s anxieties to drown out the sound of her own. Clio wanders around the ground floor as though lost in the house she lives in, opening the doors as if expecting to find someone behind them. But there is nobody else here. Not anymore.

Reading people isn’t just Clio’s job, it’s her superpower. But trying to understand herself has always proved difficult. And putting herself back together again simply wasn’t possible after what happened, not that she really tried. She didn’t think she deserved to be fixed.

Clio didn’t always live alone in the pink house. It was just the three of them back then: Clio, her husband, and their baby girl. She had a happy family of her own once upon a time, though nowit feels more like a dream. The edges of her memories a little torn and faded with time. Those were the best months, days, hours, and minutes of her life, but her happiness was stolen from her. She disappears inside herself, thinking about those three people who used to live here, people who had no clue that they were about to lose everything worth anything. That version of Clio no longer exists, and memories of that time make her feel as though she is being haunted by her own ghost. She wonders what she would have done differently if she’d been warned what might happen, and the answer is the same as always: everything.

Sure, she was tired all of the time looking after the baby, and maybe her marriage wasn’t perfect—what marriage is?—but she had it all, and couldn’t see it until it was all taken away. She should have enjoyed life more when there was so much to be happy about. Clio heads upstairs, past her bedroom, and along the landing until she reaches the room at the end of the hall. She used to be scared to open the door, but it looks different these days. This is now hercollecting room. It’s probably the nicest room in the house, with the best light and views, but Clio never used to spend too much time in here because of what this roomusedto be. Until she had a decorator paint over the pink walls with a sad shade of gray, replaced the carpet with a hard wooden floor, and paid a carpenter to line those gray walls from floor to ceiling with shelves. He thought he was building a library. It might have been a nice idea—to fill a room with stories that had happier endings than her own—but Clio doesn’t collect books.

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