Page 13 of Worse Than Murder
‘We have CCTV all around this building, and a panic button,’ Sally says. ‘You’re safe here and we want you to stay.’
I smile and nod. If I open my mouth, who knows what will come out.
‘Besides,’ Sally continues, ‘We’ve got so many weapons in that kitchen should he get in here. He doesn’t stand a chance against us.’
‘She’s right. Have you seen how Sally whips up an omelette? She’s a nightmare with a whisk.’
Philip’s attempt at humour lightens the mood a tad. I smile, but it hurts to do so.
I turn on the sofa and look out of the window. The view sprawls over the lake. The surrounding trees stand tall and lush and green, and they don’t move an inch in the breezeless evening. It’s like the world is holding its breath, waiting for me to decide what I’m going to do next.
I sigh and I can feel my body relaxing. I love it here. It’s peaceful. It’s the perfect place to recuperate. But there’s an edge. Someone is out there; I can feel it. Right now, I’m not a detective, I’m a woman filled with a mixture of raw emotion– grief and anger. If the killer shows his face and comes for me, I’m more than ready for him, and I’ll kill him with my bare hands, if I have to, and fuck the consequences.
‘Tea?’ Sally asks.
‘Please,’ I smile.
When Lynne married Iain, the mortgage to the house she had lived in with her first husband, Jack, and the three girls, was more or less paid off. Lynne said that Alison would inherit it one day so she may as well take it on now and continue paying what was left of the mortgage while she moved in with Iain in the cottage overlooking the stables.
It was the house Alison was born in, the house she took her first steps in, the house she played in with her older sisters, where she sat on her dad’s knee by the fire in the evenings while he read her a story. It was a house of happiness for the first five years of her life. After that, it was a house of pain, but it was one she couldn’t leave. Despite it being decorated several times over the last thirty years, furniture changed, new carpets, new front door, it was still the home her parents had built, and she needed to hold onto those memories.
Alison had no idea of her part in the drama that surrounded her father’s disappearance. On that fateful night, she had been plucked from a half-submerged car, wrapped in warm clothing, and taken to the safety of her home where she was put to bed. When she woke the next day, everything had changed yet again. She had no idea how or why.
Returning from her mother and stepfather’s house, Alison closes the front door behind her and heads straight upstairs to strip off her uniform and have a cooling shower. The heat of the day intensified as it went on and she thinks of Claire as she unhooks her bra.
Going down the steep, creaking stairs, in a baggy T-shirt and loose shorts, Alison pours herself a glass of wine from the fridge and goes into the living room where she slumps on the sofa.
Looking around the small room, it is difficult to believe her mother and father planned to bring up three girls here. She has asked her mum on many occasions if they’d have moved once the girls had grown bigger and she had replied with a firm no. Her mother loved this cottage, the garden, the location. Some evenings, Alison would lie back on the sofa and close her eyes and imagine how three teenagers would have coped with the cramped space. She smiles as she pictures the rows about sharing a bedroom, one sister taking another sister’s jacket or makeup without asking, her mother being the go-between, and her poor father with a constant headache in the middle of four bickering females.
She opens her eyes and sees she is the only one left in this house. Everything is a play in her head. When she recalls her actual teenage years, it is with a heavy heart. Anniversaries are always remembered– her sisters going missing, her father walking out into a swollen Lake Windermere. When Alison’s birthday comes around, or Christmas, or Easter, they’re tinged with sadness. They should be huge events with family gathered, not one person getting all the attention from a single parent and a step-parent with painted-on smiles. How can Christmas lunch be enjoyable with three empty places around the table? Exam results, passing her driving test, getting into the police force: all of these achievements were clouded by wondering what Celia and Jennifer would have been doing with their lives now.
Alison sits on the sofa and pulls out a leather-bound photo album from the shelf beneath the coffee table. She does this most nights when she’s alone, which is often, too often. It’s a thick and heavy album. Alison rests it on her lap and turns the pages. She smiles at the pictures of Celia and Jennifer in the same cot, wrapped in the same blanket, wearing matching baby-grows and hats. The identical twins balanced precariously on her father’s knee with him beaming proudly to the camera. A similar set-up of her mother holding them both, looking tired but happy. A candid shot of her father pulling a face as he changes a nappy. A photo taken in this very back garden of her father on a blanket in the middle of the grass, two toddlers finding their feet, crawling all over him. The look on his face tells Alison he is loving every minute of it. Then, the photo Alison loves the most, the one of two girls dressed in their best clothing, sitting on the sofa, carefully cradling their new baby sister.
Alison wipes a tear away before it has a chance to fall. With every passing day, she remembers them less and less. She sometimes has to close her eyes tight and fights through her memories to the short time they spent together. She can’t remember their voices or their laughter. She has no recollections of their touch and, when she enters their former bedrooms, she can’t picture them there.
Even that day when they disappeared is fragmented. She doesn’t know what a genuine memory is and what is what she’s been told by her mother or read about in the many newspaper clippings she’s saved. They were playing in the field behind the house. It was summer, the sky was a hazy blue, the sun was shining, the heat was intense, the grass was dry and hard to the touch as the three girls laughed and played. Then they were gone.
One question Alison has been asking herself for the last thirty years, the question everyone had been asking her at the time, was what the hell was the colour of the car?
She couldn’t remember. Even now, she can’t picture it. Sometimes it’s red, sometimes blue, sometimes green, occasionally it is white or black or brown or beige. And, no, she didn’t know what model it was. How many five-year-olds can tell the difference between a Fiat and a Peugeot?
Alison slams the album closed. She hates herself for being unable to remember. At first, she thought it was a game, that Celia and Jennifer were going to turn up in a few minutes and laugh, but as time slipped by, she knew they weren’t coming back. Alison had gone back to the house, back to the garden, picked up her stuffed sausage dog on a string and began walking it around the garden, talking to it. How long was it before her mother came out of the house to ask where her sisters were? How long before she began to panic? How long before the police were called?
Alison looks up. Through tear-filled eyes, she sees a framed photograph on the mantlepiece of her sitting on her father’s knee. It was taken not long before he walked to his watery grave. He’s smiling, but the pain, the grief, the sadness, radiate from him. He has his arms threaded around his only surviving daughter, holding onto her tight. The five-year-old Alison has no idea what is going on and is smiling proudly to the camera. She is with her dad. He’s her favourite person in the world. She’s happy.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Alison says.
* * *
For nearly thirty years, Alison Pemberton has been told that all the tragedy that has befallen the family was born from one single act over which nobody had any control. Nobody could have foreseen that someone would kidnap Celia and Jennifer, that they would never be found, that her father, tormented and tortured by grief, would walk into a river during a storm and never be seen again. It was a snowball event. One tragedy after another. The only person to blame was the sick bastard who had stolen the twins in the first place. Alison certainly wasn’t to blame.
It doesn’t seem to matter what anyone tells her. Alison was the only person there on that day. There wasn’t much a five-year-old could do, but if she’d have been paying more attention to the car, if she’d have tried to remember the colour of it, the make of it, any part of the registration number, if she’d done more than simply wave then go back to the garden to play with her toys, they might have been found. If so, her father wouldn’t have drowned himself. He would still be alive today. Depression and sadness would not leech from her walls. Alison would be happy instead of faking it every single day of her life.
She grabs for her laptop and googles DCI Matilda Darke again.
For the next hour, Alison reads news story after news story about the cases Darke has investigated over the years. Matilda is an exemplary detective. She heads the Homicide and Major Crime Unit at South Yorkshire Police. She caught serial killer Steve Harrison. She arrested Stuart Mills, the killer of sex workers and the husband of one of her own team members. Jonathan Harkness got away with murdering his parents for more than twenty years, until Matilda reopened the case. Laurence Dodds jumped off a building rather than face arrest by Matilda and she was instrumental in cracking a historical child sex abuse ring that involved MPs, a chief constable, and high-profile businessmen. This is a detective who refuses to take no for an answer. Matilda Darke has faced murderers, rapists, serial killers and paedophiles, and she hasn’t even flinched.
Alison has no idea what is going to happen, and she dreads how her mother will cope with the emotional upheaval of reliving everything again, but Matilda Darke is the woman she needs right now.
