Tell Tale (41 page)

I fall asleep, dropping in and out of a dream, in and out of the picture. I am the fox, being chased relentlessly across the fields by a hooded man. I wake, sweating, shaking, twisting the sheets around me. It’s dark. I flick on the light. I get out of bed, throw on some clothes, facing up to what it all means.

I run silently through the school. I need to see Adam. I need to use his computer.

She couldn’t take much with her. It wasn’t as if she was an Egyptian queen and her tomb would be stuffed with possessions for the afterlife. She wasn’t sure she’d even have a life in forty-eight hours’ time. Nina stared into her dressing-table mirror, wondering who she would become.

The house was strangely calm. Josie and Nat were upstairs attempting to use Nina’s sewing machine. She’d been called in to untangle the thread several times already. She stood in the doorway, watching the girls work. Nat was cutting fabric, while Josie joined them together. The sewing session had distracted them from making a trip to the shops, to the cinema, to potential danger. It reminded Nina of herself, how she used to make something out of nothing.
The story of my life,
she thought, going back into her and Mick’s bedroom.

She lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting, going over everything in her head a thousand times, like she would before a play opened. All the props must be put back in their correct places after the previous show. All the makeup checked, all the effects put away and stock reordered. There was no room for error, for a wig gone astray, or an
empty bottle of fake blood. Just as now, just as in real life, everything had to be ready and perfect for the finale. She was absolutely terrified.

Nina reached a hand across to Mick’s side of the bed. She stroked the empty space. It would be the hardest thing she had ever done. She imagined him lying there, and tried to explain to him in her head. But he rose up from the sheets in a terrible rage, demanding explanations, furious that he’d been kept out of her past.

‘But I’m your
husband
,’ she heard him say, dejected, confused, let down. Then there was Josie – turbulent, beautiful, passionate, demanding. Nina didn’t know which would hurt her more, knowing that your mother had been living a lie for her entire life, or being let down so badly that she’d never get over it.

She’d taken the cash from the pot she kept in the utility room cupboard. Her secret Christmas fund. Before Mick’s recent success with the galleries, money had been tight. Cautious as ever, Nina had been saving here and there – ten pounds one week, twenty the next. Soon enough, a few hundred pounds had accumulated. It paid for the heap of metal that the dealer called a car.

‘Name?’ he’d asked, to put on the receipt.

‘Davies,’ Nina had said automatically. ‘Sarah Davies.’ He didn’t care, and neither did she. She had no intention of registering it. She drove the old wreck away from the garage in a cloud of smoke, and twenty minutes later it was parked in the pre-planned spot she had carefully chosen the day before. Stashed in the boot was a small suitcase
containing the clothes and other necessities she had recently purchased, also using the saved-up cash. As each stage of the plan came together, Nina’s heart beat a little faster. She knew that very soon she would hardly be able to contain it in her chest.

Mick was in his studio working. It was a good thing, Nina thought, that life was going on as normal around her. Her recent behaviour – nervous, emotional, erratic and suspicious – was a perfect answer to the aftermath that would be filled with questions; the note left, reread a thousand times.

Why? How could she? Did anyone see it coming?

Nina had no idea if her plan would work; only that she had no option left but to try. There was no one to turn to for help – no one that she could trust, anyway, and she didn’t want to endanger those she loved any more than she already had.

She consoled herself with the thought that it might not be forever; that somehow if she was clever, she could claw back a shred of what she once had, maybe even return, explain, beg forgiveness. But it would be a long time off yet. Without that thought, Nina would have ended things for real. As it was, the uncertainty of her not surviving anyway hung as fat as the moon above the city. Either way, the only certainty in life now was death.

I broke into a thousand pieces. The receiver dangled on its shiny cord, and, with my knees bent, my back slumped against the glass, I slid down the inside of the telephone box.

The police were coming. I’d told them everything.

Two female officers helped me into their car. They were bright, cheerful, acting as though nothing was wrong, humouring me, even though I knew things would never be the same again. We drove past Roecliffe. ‘There,’ I whispered, pointing into the woodland. ‘In there.’

As we went by, I saw a single blue light ticking in the night. Marking the spot I’d described on the phone. They’d found her.

I would never see Betsy again.

The constables spoke in quiet voices, spoke in code on the radio, drove me through the night, glanced at me in the rear-view mirror, and took me to the police station.

They gave me a blanket – brown and itchy, the kind fit for covering the shoulders of criminals, not the shaking bones of a young girl who had just witnessed a murder.

Someone gave me tomato soup in a mug. Clumps of powder stuck to the sides.

‘Is there anyone you’d like to call?’ a man asked. He wasn’t in uniform.

I shook my head. Maybe Patricia, I thought. Or Miss Maddocks. But what if they’d known about this all along? ‘There’s no one I want to call,’ I said. The soup burned my lips.

Over the next few days, I gave statements until my voice dried up. Every detail of the last ten years of my life at Roecliffe was recorded. I was sent to a foster family. I spent my eighteenth birthday with strangers, and while technically I could no longer rely on the council for care, someone had taken pity on me and allowed me to stay in the warm, comfortable home that had a mother, a father, other children, smiles and soft carpet.

I lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling. My temporary mother sat beside me and I pretended that it was her, my real mother, and she’d been there all along, that this was my family home and life had been filled with happiness.

‘I love you, Mum.’ I said the words that had been missing for so long. She stroked my head, but didn’t reply. From somewhere distant, I heard the words,
I love you too.

There was a line-up. I’d seen them in cop shows on the flickering TV at the children’s home, but never thought I’d be the one staring blankly through the one-way glass. It was easy to identify them, yet the hardest thing I’d ever done. Worse than seeing a dead body, because they were real; they were alive and dangerous. They stared back with unblinking eyes, knowing that I was only feet away even though they
couldn’t see me. They were rabid dogs and they’d got my scent.

There were three separate line-ups of carefully selected adult men. They wore sweaters, glasses, brown shoes, some had their hair combed back. A couple wore rings and watches, and one was taller than the others. They were normal.They were someone’s father or son or brother. They would blend in on the street.

‘That one,’ I said immediately. They’d already made three arrests based on my statement. The line-ups were to officially confirm who I’d seen. Two detectives stood behind me. I knew I was being observed, through the one-way window behind me: them watching me watching them. ‘Number two.’

‘Take your time,’ the detective said.

‘I don’t need to. It’s him.’ It was easy. I’d seen him pretty much every day during my years at Roecliffe Primary School. The kids liked him; he was popular. He made up stories and let us do our work outside in the summer. ‘He was one of the men in the chapel. His name is Mr Tulloch.’

The next line-up consisted of six middle-aged men. Most wore dark jackets, except the last one who wore a beige coat. ‘That one,’ I said, pointing to a grey-haired man in a navy blazer. ‘Mr Leaby was in the chapel too.’ I looked away. He’d been in charge of the children’s home forever. Hundreds of children had passed through his care. The detectives nodded. I sipped the water they’d put out for me, feeling the veneer around my soul harden as the final group of men were brought in front of the glass screen.

This time, I took a little longer. The youngest of the men I’d witnessed that night was the one who buzzed around the grounds of Roecliffe on his ride-on mower. Some of the older girls had a crush on him, and some of the boys got to sit on his knee as the tractor carved grooves in the massive lawns.

‘He was there too,’ I said. ‘Number five.’ I pointed at his scraggy features. ‘He’s called Karl.’

I learned, after the trial, that his full name was Karl Burnett. His mother was German. His father was a wife-beater, a drug dealer, a car thief, with a second home behind bars. Growing up in gangland London, Karl had seen the darker side of life. But he wasn’t stupid or without ambition. The papers told his story, about how he’d moved away from the scene of his deprived childhood to start a new life in the north. He’d enrolled in college, taken a part-time job with a landscape gardening firm, fallen in with the wrong people; the same people that had haunted the lives of dozens of children at Roecliffe.

There was no fourth line-up. What point was there in showing me a group of men with black hoods on their heads? None of the arrested would talk, spill names; none were up for telling tales. The one who killed Betsy was the one who walked free.

The first threat came two days before the trial began. The three men whose identity I had confirmed were in custody, but there were more of their kind out there. Even though the children’s home had been shut down immediately, the kids farmed off to other institutions, some
of the sickos continued underground, avoiding police radar. That was what it was all about, a detective told me when I asked. ‘We’re cleaning up all the shit,’ he said.

It was an anonymous phone call, at my foster home, plainly telling me that I would die if I didn’t change my statement and tell the police that I was mistaken about what I’d seen. By that time, it wouldn’t have made much difference. Other evidence proved that Leaby, Tulloch and Burnett were guilty of heinous crimes to dozens of children.

Tulloch had confessed during one of his many grillings by the determined detective in charge of the case. He named several others in the ring, but refused to name the hooded one. The police told me they’d got a squealer, that they were going to catch Betsy’s killer. Then they found Tulloch hanging in his cell. Someone had given him a belt.

Further arrests followed. Bodies were exhumed from all over the grounds of Roecliffe, the first being Betsy’s limp form from her shallow grave. There would be no funeral. Just a medical cremation after forensics had finished with her.

After I was hit by the car, I had a police guard in hospital. ‘Someone wants you dead,’ the detective told me. He had a daughter my age, he said. He showed me a crumpled photo stuck inside his wallet. She was dark-haired, like me, but prettier. He would look after me, he promised. Make sure that nothing bad happened again. I didn’t like his smile.

It was after the knife attack that I was finally moved from the area to emergency accommodation. I couldn’t give
them a description – his face was concealed – but he was strong, he smelled of car oil, and he meant me to die. If my foster-father hadn’t come in the front door, causing the intruder to flee by the back, the knife would have gone in properly, would have punctured my heart.

‘Oh Christ, Ava!’ He spilled on to the floor beside me, pressing his hands to my ribs. I wanted to tell him to stop, that it hurt so bad, just to let me bleed, to die, but the air had gone from my lungs.

I woke in hospital surrounded by doctors and police uniforms. Three days later, I was transferred to a private nursing home. They wouldn’t tell me where it was, and the female detective who’d accompanied me said I’d been registered under a temporary name.

‘Temporary?’ I replied, thinking that’s how I’d felt my whole life.

‘Until you get a new one. There are people who will help you now.’

It was lucky, they told me several weeks later, that I didn’t have any family. ‘The witness protection scheme deals with relatives in certain cases, but relocating an entire household has its drawbacks.’

Mark McCormack looked different every time I saw him. Perhaps it was his job that made him appear as a casual labourer in jeans and check shirt one day, and a businessman in suit and tie the next. He talked me through the whole process.

‘You can choose your own name,’ he said. It was the only thing I got to decide.

I settled on Nina Brookes because it sounded normal, as if the person it belonged to had had a proper start in life; that she might be studying at college, or popular with a group of friends her own age, or learning to drive, or madly in love. It certainly didn’t sound as if she’d been living in a children’s home filled with paedophiles for the last ten years. It didn’t sound, either, as if she had no idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

‘We’re sending you to Bristol,’ McCormack told me when the trial was underway. ‘It’s a much bigger deal than we ever anticipated.’ He was simplifying things for me, I knew, but I didn’t want to hear the adult truth; didn’t want to know the extent of the horror I’d been living with. ‘You’ll be given a new identity, a new home, enrolled at college if you wish or set up with a job. Funds will be allocated to get you started and I will be checking up on you regularly. I will be your only contact with your old life.’

I nodded, frowning, contemplating being a naive teenage one moment and an independent woman the next. Mark had taken me to a burger restaurant, not far from the second foster family I’d been sent to. Like the hospital, they’d been given my temporary name, wondered why I didn’t reply straight away when they called me down for food or chatted to me around the dinner table.

‘You’ll be moving away in one week.’ He slid some leaflets across the sticky table. ‘College courses,’ he said. He was a kind man, today wearing clothes that suggested he was my dad, even though he wasn’t old enough – a body warmer, a striped shirt, grey trousers. He had stubble. I
liked him. ‘I have all the documents you’ll need for a new start. There’s somewhere for you to live, too. The landlady knows you’re coming. She has no idea who you are, what you’ve been through.’