The Silent Ones (30 page)

The policemen looked at each other. ‘It seems he faked an identity and was working as a cleaner to gain access to—’

Melanie took a quick step forward to counter what she knew was coming. ‘That is rubbish.’

The policemen looked at each other again.

Melanie didn’t answer. She walked out of the room and took the stairs two at a time to Darren’s bedroom. When Andy and the police officers came into the room behind her, she was already rifling through disorganised piles of paper and drawing pads, cigarette papers and clothing.

‘As you can appreciate, this is a serious security breach and Darren has committed fraud,’ a police officer said. There are concerns that he may have passed Olivia Duvall inappropriate material, or been subjected to influence that may be dangerous.’

‘Dangerous to who?’ snapped Melanie.

‘The public, Mrs Evans. As a relative of a victim he is in an acutely dangerous position having access to Olivia Duvall. Inmates such as her are manipulative and potentially a danger to those they interact with.’

Melanie’s itching was overtaken by her anger.

‘Darling, what are you looking for?’ Andy asked desperately.

Clothes were raining down from shelves, dusty video game cases clattering to the floor. ‘He told me he was seeing someone he worked with—’

She stopped, her hand on a cheap blue polyester top. She unfolded it and froze. There, above where Darren’s heart would be, was Roehampton High-Security Hospital’s logo.

Melanie turned to Andy and felt herself tipping sideways. Her desire to find Carly had made her go through the madness of meeting the Witch, and inspired by her, Darren had chosen his own, more extreme and dangerous version of the same thing. She was convinced she herself had sown the seeds of his destruction.

And as so often in recent times, as she fell to the floor she saw Andy reaching out in a desperate attempt to save her.

T
he ride to Orin’s building took Darren forty minutes. He tried to go up to his office, but when he got there the door was locked and no one was around. He cursed silently. He had hit a dead end. He came back out into the street and walked round the corner to a walkway by the river. He tried calling Orin again but there was still no answer. He hung up and saw that he had two missed calls, the first from his mum.

When he played back her message it nearly broke his heart.

‘Darren? Where are you? You need to come home. The police are here. They say you’ve been seeing the Witch.’ Her voice caught in her throat. ‘You need to ring me and tell me it’s not true.’

The next person on the voicemail was Chloe. ‘You lying toad! I don’t even know what your name is. I hate you! I trusted you, I shared things with you and you lied! Over and over again.’ She didn’t say goodbye when she cut the call.

He took his phone and hurled it as high and as far as he could into the river, then stood staring at the grey swirling surface. He stood there for a long time, marooned. He knew he had to go home and face the music, but he couldn’t do it. He was a coward and he couldn’t do it.

He looked about him. He was near Borough Market, where Berenice was baking cakes to sell in the morning. She would give him a sympathetic ear; she wouldn’t condemn him for trying to get to the truth. Hadn’t she only this morning revelled in the revenge she herself had enacted on the man who had attacked her? Her reaction to the paedophile in the paper this morning convinced him that Berenice’s was where he needed to go.

The market was closing when Darren got there, road sweepers cleaning away blown-about newspapers and takeaway cartons, council refuse trucks emptying huge rubbish bins that made the unpleasant summer smells of the city puff across the expanses of tarmac. Borough Market had once been the capital’s premier fruit and veg market, sheltering under the railway lines that tangled their way from Blackfriars and London Bridge stations to south-east England, boxed in by Victorian buildings in no regular pattern. During the day asparagus from Surrey and apples from Kent crowded next to expensive fudge stalls for tourists and tables groaning with French cheese, and at night bars and restaurants did brisk trade selling food from every corner of the globe.

Darren coasted around on his bike, pausing to ask a man packing up a van if he knew Berenice or where the cakemaker’s railway arch was. The guy shrugged and shook his head. Darren came round past a tapas restaurant where, on this hot night, diners were spilling out on to the pavement, and took a side alley. He asked an old man leaning against a wall enjoying a cigarette if he knew Berenice. He got a shake of the head in response.

Darren began walking around grimier and quieter alleys, reading signs and painted hoardings, checking the storage sheds under the railway arches, looking for Berenice’s name or that of her business. He didn’t find it. There was no logic to how the market was laid out and he lost his sense of direction a few times as he travelled down cobbled streets and across bumpy concrete expanses.

He began to panic. He couldn’t find her and that meant he had to think about going home. He coasted into a narrow side road by a row of railway arches that had been adopted as workshops and storage units and stopped. He could see a white Ford Transit van parked by a high brick wall on the other side of the road. He cycled up to the window of the van and looked in. Bingo. A couple of farmers’ market magazines lay on the passenger seat, along with a Tupperware container. He knew it was Berenice’s van: he’d seen it on the security monitors at Roehampton.

He stood back and shouted her name. He tried again and a man appeared from behind a blue door set in an arch and directed him further down the street towards a railway arch filled in with bricks with a red metal door set into it. There was no name. Darren knocked. Nothing happened. He knocked again. He stood back and looked around.

A moment later Berenice came round a corner, a bag of shopping in her hand.

She stopped in confusion when she saw him, looking around nervously. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to come and see you.’

She didn’t move. ‘I know who you are, Darren. Everyone at the hospital knows.’

‘I just want to talk. Please.’

‘Aren’t the police looking for you?’

‘Probably.’

She gave him a look that suggested pity. ‘They’ll be sympathetic, but not if you run and make trouble.’

‘Trouble’s already come.’

There was silence. He looked around. ‘Is this your arch?’

She nodded, but seemed reluctant to move.

‘I’m starving. You got any food in that bag?’

She relented and walked towards the red door. She unlocked it and put the keys back in her pocket.

‘You don’t have your name on the door.’

‘I don’t want to draw attention to myself. There are often break-ins.’ She stepped inside, turned on the light. He was in a commercial kitchen, with brick walls and no windows, a cooker and fridge and sink along the right-hand wall and low lights hanging from the high curved ceiling. The middle of the room was dominated by an island topped with stainless steel. Beyond, the back wall of the lock-up was lined with shelves and two wooden trestle tables were propped up against it.

Berenice closed the door and put the shopping bag on the island.

Darren took his backpack off and did the same. ‘It’s nice in here. How did you end up with this?’

She looked around. ‘I won it in a card game. Don’t look so surprised. I’ve come from nothing and fought for what little I’ve got now. This was one of my few pieces of luck.’ She turned away from him towards the shelves, pulled a knife block back with her and put it on the island. She pulled a loaf of bread from the bag and began to slice it. A train rumbled loudly overhead.

He began to walk around the space, examining it. The shelves along the back wall were cluttered: at waist and shoulder height there were Tupperware boxes in myriad shapes and sizes, a blender, laminated certificates for a cookery course completed and a hygiene certificate from the council, storage jars with flour and dried fruit and other ingredients Darren couldn’t identify. He ran his hand along the top of one of the trestle tables and noticed that in the corner leaned a skateboard.

Berenice saw Darren staring at it. ‘If I tried to ride that I’d probably end up in A and E. I use it to move my trestle tables to my pitch. They weigh a ton. This way, the wheels do all the work.’

They looked at each other as silence stole up around them. When Berenice spoke again her voice was quiet. ‘You need to go home, Darren. Your mum needs you. You need to sort this out.’

‘I did it to try and find my sister. My mum’s ill with cancer.’

‘I know,’ Berenice replied. ‘Did Olivia ever tell you anything, anything at all?’

He shrugged, realising she was the first person he had talked to about his demented plan. She seemed ill at ease and Darren wondered if she was scared of him. The thought horrified him. ‘No, not really. I think she has issues with her sister’s death, and with Molly’s mum’s boyfriend.’ He tailed off. It sounded pathetic, what he was saying; what he had discovered was so shallow and slight as to be meaningless.

He saw her relax and a thought came to him. ‘Why do you work at Roehampton? It’s not a very nice place and the pay’s bad. This space you have here is so much more – dynamic somehow.’

She became defensive. ‘It’s not that bad. I get Thursdays and Fridays off to come here. Not everyone has endless choices. I’ll make you a sandwich and then you need to go.’

He felt ashamed for seeming to criticise her. After what
he
had done! He backed into the corner as if retreating from his own ill-considered comment. He cast around for something to hold on to, something to do to delay all the problems he had to face for just a little while longer. He put his foot on the skateboard. It was old and well used, with chips on its edges and grime in the textured surface.

He had been a good boarder when he was younger. Riding pavements and riding waves, free and uncomplicated. Oh how he wished he could push himself off and coast away from his troubles. But it was a fantasy and he was so very tired. He put his toe on the end of the board so that the other end poked skywards and caught it in his hand. He felt the rough grain of the riding surface under his palm and the comforting weight of it. It was a childish toy. The things he had done belonged to a grown-up world and he had to face the consequences. He had to face them as a man.

He turned and put the skateboard back next to the trestle table, its wheels facing him. Between the wheels was a graffiti tag. Most skateboards had them, a riot of colour and action. This one was different, a white squiggle on a black background. The curve of a C under the embrace of an E. He froze. He knew that tag, as individual as a signature. It had been drawn on the end of a surfboard that now lay in a Streatham attic, and had been engraved in an act of love on the back of his neck. Now somehow – somehow – it had ended up on the bottom of this skateboard.

Darren spun round but he was too slow to avoid the punch to the side of his head. He fell to the floor and rolled under the kitchen island, shock and confusion coursing through him. Berenice came round the island and jabbed down at him with a knife, scraping it along the floor as he scrabbled himself upright away from her. He danced back, reaching behind him for anything on the shelves he could throw at her.

She was panting with exertion, her eyes wild, her face set with determination. Darren thought he must have hit his head on the floor, as a thousand images burst across his retina simultaneously: Chloe’s words in his car at the beach in Devon,
White vans are great for transporting bodies in;
Orin standing by his window in his office,
You know how hard it is to bury a dead body by yourself?
A heart carved into a scoop of mashed potato on a tray that came back to the kitchens every day, a simple message system. He had mistakenly thought the heart had been for him, but it had been for her. There
had
been someone else acting with Olivia, and Darren was looking right at her.

She held the knife like a dagger, tracking him round the island.

He hurled the blender at Berenice’s head, catching her on the shoulder. It clattered away across the room. ‘You killed Molly,’ he gasped. ‘You two did it together. You did all of it together, it’s just that only one of you is locked up.’

Berenice scowled. ‘You know nothing, little boy. You couldn’t stay away, you couldn’t leave it alone. You don’t know what you’re dealing with and now you leave me no choice. Stupid boy!’

‘Where is Carly?’ he screamed and she raced round the island for him, the knife slashing down. Darren danced backwards but the knife caught him in the front of the thigh, a searing pain exploding up his leg. He kicked out at her desperately and she backed away round the island again, waiting for her chance to attack.

He was panting heavily, feeling his trousers, wet where the blood must be soaking through them, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her for a second. His rucksack was on the island. He risked a glance over at it and blessed his absent-mindedness: he’d never closed the zip.

He needed to keep her talking. ‘How did the police never find you? How could you be so well hidden?’ It could only have a chance of success if the whole thing was carefully planned, a long time in advance. ‘Why did you do it?’

‘You’re so naïve.’ She began to move slowly round the island so he had to reluctantly move away from his bag. ‘A man.’ She spat the words out. ‘Who’s responsible for all the evil in the world? All the violence and the suffering? All because of what hangs between your legs.’

He got angry then, thinking of Molly rotting in a hole in the ground. ‘You’re as deluded as Olivia. Where’s my sister?’

‘It’s so simple to you; someone is lost so they must be found. Sometimes people can’t be found, and sometimes they don’t want to be found.’

Darren lunged for the rucksack, using the bag to uppercut Berenice in the face. He slammed backwards into the shelving, rooting desperately in the bag for what he needed.