Tell Tale (32 page)

Several students gathered round Ethan Reacher after the workshop. They’d been given a glimpse into the world of
special effects and been allowed to demonstrate their own skills to one of the best in the business. Now they wanted to thank him personally. Nina queued up to shake the man’s hand.

‘I noticed your work earlier,’ Ethan said to her. He downed more water and at close range, Nina could see why. He was pouring sweat. ‘You stood out. You plan to make a career in theatre or movies?’

‘Oh yes,’ she replied. At twenty, Nina had never been so overawed by anyone. Most people she had met in her life so far had only ever let her down. ‘It’s everything to me.’

‘You’re good,’ he said, nodding, looking her up and down. ‘Take my card. Give me a call when you’re qualified. How long have you got to go?’

‘Another year,’ Nina said. Her heart beat frantically. She could hardly believe that Ethan Reacher had singled her out. Suddenly the year loomed ahead like a decade. Why can’t I be finished with college right now? she thought.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Nina Brookes.’ Her voice was thin and breathy. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she continued. ‘For a wonderful day. I’ve learned a lot.’

Ethan Reacher bellowed a laugh after jotting down her name. ‘If nothing else, you learned how
not to
fall off a cliff,’ he roared, before walking off with a group of students following in his wake.

It wasn’t as if she hadn’t tried. Josie was still sleeping and Mick wouldn’t be back inside for a while. Nina phoned
every police department she could think of, and looked up numbers on the internet. She made sure she dialled ‘141’ each time, withholding her number. She didn’t want anyone calling her back. Unless she found Mark McCormack, or at least someone who could confirm that they had stepped into his shoes, then Nina wasn’t giving any details away.

‘I’m sorry, there’s no access to that area of CID without a special referral and contact name. Your liaison officer will put you in touch with—’ Nina hung up.

‘Mark who? Can you spell the surname?’

‘That department has moved on, it’s all centralised in London now.’

When Nina rang Scotland Yard, she went through six departments, finally getting close to someone who could possibly help with witness protection. Just saying those words sent her into a flat spin. ‘Name and reference number please,’ she asked.

‘Miranda Bailey,’ Nina said, plucking a name from nowhere. ‘I don’t have a reference number.’

There was silence for a while. ‘I’m sorry. There’s no access on the system for a Miranda Bailey.’

Nina hung up again. ‘No access,’ she whispered as her face pressed against the cold table. How can I tell them who I am? she thought in despair. Mark told me it was more than my life was worth to trust anyone that he’d not personally sanctioned. How can I tell just anyone in the police who I am, when several of the men arrested were in the force themselves?

‘Nina?’ Mick’s voice was behind her. ‘What’s up?’

Nina’s head shot up off the table. She snapped shut the lid of her laptop. She attempted a smile. ‘You look like I feel,’ she commented. ‘What time were you up this morning?’

‘I didn’t go to bed,’ he admitted. ‘I need coffee.’ Mick banged about with the machine and cups, dropping the box of filter papers on to the floor.

‘Don’t you think you should tell one of these galleries that you need more time?’ Nina hated to see Mick like this. She needed him fresh, on the ball, ready for action at any minute. As it was, he could hardly spoon the coffee into the machine without spilling it. ‘You’re exhausted. You can’t keep churning out work at this rate.’

Mick turned and threw the teaspoon across the room, narrowly missing Nina’s cheek. ‘Churning out work?’ he yelled. ‘Is that what you think I bloody do all day?’ He slammed the lid on the glass coffee jug and rammed it home. ‘We haven’t all got the luxury to pick and choose when we work or not, Nina. You find it quite easy to take an afternoon off here and there, I’ve noticed, without a care about our next mortgage payment.’ Mick spat out an incredulous noise and paced the kitchen. He smacked the top of the coffee machine, wanting it to hurry up so he could escape back to the studio.

‘I know you’re under a lot of stress at—’

‘You don’t know what stress is,’ he retorted. ‘Not this kind of stress.’

Nina didn’t know what to say to make him feel better. She’d never seen him like this before.

‘What about telling that man . . .’ she couldn’t bring herself to say his name. ‘What about telling that man from the new gallery that you can’t do the paintings? Just concentrate on the Marley Gallery. They asked you first, after all.’

Mick stopped dead still. His muscles tightened and pulled his face into an expression that Nina didn’t recognise. ‘Tell him I can’t do the paintings?’ Mick was suddenly calm. Nina thought he was seeing reason; that if he agreed not to work for Burnett there was maybe a chance of getting him out of their lives for good, without Mick or Josie knowing anything. We could move, Nina thought. Maybe change our last name. Mick would understand if I made up an excuse, but he wouldn’t understand that I’d lied to him about who I am for the last eighteen years.

‘Tell him I can’t do the paintings?’ Mick yelled.

Nina jumped. ‘I just thought—’

He came up close to her. ‘You really don’t have a clue, do you? Not a bloody clue about my work at all.’

‘I understand how precious this is to you. I know how many years you’ve struggled to get the recognition you deserve. Christ, I’ve lived with you for most of them.’ Nina backed off but Mick stuck to her. A thread of fear wound its way from her head to her heart, but her heart rejected the emotion. This is your
husband,
she told herself, and it caused her to reach out to him.

‘Don’t,’ he said, recoiling. Mick yanked the coffee jug from the machine before it was finished. He sloshed some into a mug. ‘Just don’t,’ he said again, before going back out to the studio.

Nina watched him walk down the garden, his coffee spilling over the sides of the mug. When he neared the studio, he hurled the cup into the air. It came down against the side of a tree, shattering in slow motion over the shrubs.

‘What’s going on, Mum?’ Josie stood sleepily in the doorway. ‘I heard shouting.’

‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ she said, pulling back the tears. ‘What time do you call this to get up?’

‘It’s still the summer holidays. I wanted a lie-in.’ Josie reached for a cereal box and frowned when she felt the weight of the milk carton. ‘No milk?’

‘You know where the shop is,’ Nina snapped but instantly regretted it. She didn’t want Josie going out anywhere alone. Not until she’d resolved this mess.

‘Fine. I’ll go to Nat’s for breakfast. Her mum does eggs and pancakes.’

Nina thought of Laura beating hell out of the batter before splatting it into a frying pan and roughly dropping it on to a plate when it was blackened at the edges. Laura was no cook. She took out her frustrations in the kitchen.

‘Oh, Josie.’ Nina reached out for her daughter, but she backed away with her eyebrows raised as if her mother was a stranger. ‘I’ll make you eggs.’

Josie walked off, shaking her head, slamming the door.

That’s both of them, Nina thought. My husband and my daughter have each pushed me away in the last five minutes. She slid down the wall to become a puddle on the floor. Perhaps they are trying to tell me something.

Twenty-four hours after I died, I went dizzy and my vision blurred. I’d had a serious blow to the head and, even though I’d taken advice, researched the subject as much as time would allow, I can’t say exactly what went wrong, what I’d misjudged. But the plain fact was, against all the odds, I was lucky to be alive. At least that part had gone to plan. The rest was out of my control.

A trip to the hospital was impossible. That first evening, I sat in the motel room watching a quiz show, shivering, wondering why I didn’t know the answers to any of the general knowledge questions, or even have the concentration to count the vile flowers on the grubby curtains. I could hardly breathe in and out at the thought of everything; could hardly believe I was dead.

Had anyone read my letter yet? I wondered.

I bit into an apple. Earlier, the woman I hadn’t yet fully become had plucked it off the supermarket display and taken it to the checkout in a basket also containing hair dye, scissors, biscuits, fruit, chocolate, water. I had handed over cash and then stashed my shopping in the boot of my new car – a twenty-year-old Ford Escort also paid for in cash
from a dealer on the edge of town. He didn’t ask questions. If it got me where I was going, I’d be thankful. Soon enough it would be in a lay-by, keys in the ignition, ripe for stripping.

There was a knock on my door. I froze. My ribs contracted with pain.

‘Hello? You in there?’ Whoever it was banged harder. I jabbed the remote at the television to turn down the volume. I flicked off the bedside lamp but it was too late. ‘Open the door, love.’ It was a woman’s voice.

I got off the bed and, leaving the security chain on, I opened the door a crack, just enough to smell the cigarettes on her. It was the woman from the motel front desk. ‘Yes?’

‘I wanted to make sure that you were OK.’

I frowned. I put up a hand to tuck my hair behind my ear, but my hair wasn’t there any more. ‘Yes, I’m fine.’ I felt giddy and sick. I didn’t want to know why she thought I might not be. I closed the door but she stuck in her foot. She was a big woman.

‘It’s just that you looked a bit upset when you checked in. You seemed agitated. As if something was wrong.’

‘No, everything’s fine. Really.’ I smiled and pushed on the door but her foot was still there.

‘Did you see a doctor about your face?’ She raised a hand to her own cheek.

‘Oh, that’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right as rain in a couple of days.’

‘OK, love. If you’re sure.’ She turned to go but then changed her mind. ‘It’s just that we sometimes have women
come to stay with us who’ve been, well, hurt by their men and—’

‘It’s nothing like that. I fell off my bike. Good night.’ This time she nodded and allowed the door to close.

I went to bed but didn’t sleep. I listened to cars coming and going, to people chattering along the passageway outside my door. I listened to the pub fallout late in the evening, and I listened to the radio to hide the sound of my own sobbing.

In the morning, I put on a brave face, a new face, and I made a phone call. I had the rest of my life to take care of.

The woman is in her mid-sixties. When she opens the front door, she looks us up and down, taking note of everything, right down to the tape recorder that Adam is holding and the handbag I have slung over my shoulder.

There is a moment’s hesitation as her eyes flick between us both, but she doesn’t give anything away as her gaze lingers on my face a beat too long, making me wonder about her just as much as she is no doubt wondering about me. She looks familiar but I can’t quite place her face.

‘Thank you for agreeing to this,’ Adam says. He shakes her hand. Her grey hair is scraped back into a painful bun as if it hasn’t been released for decades, and her powdered face is stretched clean of wrinkles by her startled expression. Despite all this hardness, the angular bones, the tight hairstyle, tiny mouth carved into a man-sized chin, there’s a softness about her. It’s that, I’m assuming, that makes her stand aside and let us in.

‘This way, please.’ She leads us into a small living room. There is a coal fire burning in the grate. There’s no air and I feel dizzy. She indicates we should take a seat on the small tapestry-covered settee. Adam and I sit down beside each other, our legs brushing, while she occupies the single chair by the fire.

‘I appreciate your time.’ He holds up his tape recorder. ‘Do you mind?’

The woman nods once and sends a glance my way. I detect a nip of her brow, a quiver of her jaw. She folds her hands in her lap and presses her ankles together. ‘I don’t have long,’ she tells us.

Adam is edgy, tense, but excited too. He speaks fast, as if this woman is the key to finishing his book. I could tell him that she isn’t; that he’s going to have to dig deeper than he ever imagined if he wants a resolution. But I don’t. Instead, I give him an encouraging look, which prompts him to switch on the Dictaphone.

‘Can you tell me when you started working at Roecliffe Children’s Home and what your position was?’

The woman clears her throat. ‘I started on the fifth of June nineteen seventy-one. I left when the children’s home was shut down in nineteen eighty-seven. I looked after those children as if I were their mother.’

I stare hard at her. My forearms chill and my feet go numb as it dawns on me. I bow my head.

Why did I come here?

‘Can you take a look at this list of names and tell me if you recognise any of them?’

The woman holds the piece of paper at arm’s length, squinting as if she usually wears reading glasses. After a moment, she nods. ‘Yes. I remember most of these names. They were at the children’s home. Some of them were brought in as babies.’

‘And can you confirm what happened to them?’ Adam is visibly shaking. His neck is flushed from the open collar of his white shirt right up to his hairline.

‘Poor little sods all died, didn’t they?’ That’s when I hear the woman from the past – a rough-hewn voice stained with weariness, with contempt, and fatigue. Gone is the forced accent, a veil of pretentiousness, and in its place is wedged someone else. ‘That’s what the police said, anyway. I told them everything I knew back then.’

‘You’ll know then that when the paedophile ring was first discovered, three men were convicted of abusing and murdering the children, before more of the network was broken up.’

No one says anything. The fire hisses and belts out a heat so fierce my left cheek turns scarlet. The woman is suddenly tight-fisted with her words. Adam’s Dictaphone wheezes in his hand. ‘Yes.’

‘But weren’t there actually four men involved with the final murder at Roecliffe? One of them escaped and was never identified. He didn’t go to prison like the others, am I right?’ Adam’s chest rises as he sucks in breath, holding it firm until the woman speaks. I find myself doing the same, focusing on picking the skin from my fingers instead of recalling the hooded, faceless monster covered in blood,
bending over the altar like a surgeon at work.