The Stepmother (23 page)

‘Oh my God!’ My own voice shocks me – an ugly ricochet in the warm summer evening. ‘Oh no, Marlena.’

‘My God indeed.’ Marlena’s voice is grim.

‘It can’t be true,’ I whisper.

‘Can’t it?’ she says. ‘Well you might know. I bloody hope not, for his sake. For your sake I mean.’

I read it again, the type swirling in my panic.

It feels unbearable.

‘And it was her you know,’ Marlena says. ‘I only just found out, but it wasn’t Frankie sending the emails.’

Thank God. My brain’s not computing properly though.

‘Jeanie? Did you hear me? Those emails came from Scarlett.’

O
nly ever half the story
: that’s what we get. Half the story. Half a picture. Half an idea of what, say, a marriage is actually like behind closed doors.

Half a picture of
any
relationship. We jump to our judgements and conclusions from what we see; we think we know best from what we only have glimpses of.

Of this I am well aware.

This is the second time I’ve got my affairs of the heart so very wrong – and I’m still paying for the first time of course.

I already know he’s found me. He found me at the start of last year.

After Otto.

I was a sitting duck. Easy prey. But of course he knew that about me already. He knew too much; he knew everything.

And now Matthew too. I’m so horrified I find I don’t even want to ask him his side. I don’t want to hear his story; I don’t want to talk to him at all.

Marlena has tried to emphasise that there’s no proof of anything yet, that these are only allegations at this stage.

But my despair is huge and absolute. It engulfs me. Shame rages through me to such a degree I don’t know what to do.

I let Scarlett down; she was a kid who needed help, just like I was once a kid who needed help – and I left her in the lion’s mouth.

I ignored the signs. I thought they were the signs of a loving father. I didn’t know; I had no benchmark, and I suppose, looking back, I chose not to believe he could be capable of such an atrocity.

How can I live with myself now?

All the horrors are being reopened, relived.

Since I read this news story last night, I just want to sleep. It’s Sunday, so I don’t have to go into school.

I can’t sleep though, not yet. I’m waiting.

When I crawled into bed last night, I thought I heard a light knock at the door, and I wondered if it was my neighbour Ruth. I pulled the covers higher, and I didn’t hear it again.

T
here is
a skinned rabbit slung over the cottage fence when I walk back up from the shop with milk and bread.

I’m not even surprised.

reads the note around its poor neck. There are numbers on the back – coordinates. I take it all down before the neighbours can see.

I wonder how much time I’ve got. Not much, I reckon.

I
n the early
evening I walk into the back garden and through the little gate and across the field. The moon is etched on the blue sky like it’s been drawn in chalk.

By the far hedgerow I see what I imagine is a hare, running free, long back legs powering him along, and I think of the freedom of the wild. He reminds me of my favourite book as a kid, a little girl looking out of the window at the moon. We didn’t have many books in our house, not many at all. It must have been the school’s.

‘What’s in the moon?’ I asked my nan when she came to see us, and she told me it was cheese.

I loved that book; I used to think that little girl was me, staring up at the moon so wistfully.

I can’t reach the moon though. It’s too late.

W
hen Matthew was trying
to hurt me a while back, when he announced it was over – for now – he also said I was a blank.

‘You’re like – you’re not there, Jeanie, a no one. I thought I could really love you, and you could help me with my future, but you’re blank.’

He couldn’t read me, he said, because there was nothing to me: I hardly existed.

Or maybe I said the last part.

And now I think,
Perhaps it’s true.
Perhaps I don’t really exist. I never have, not since – I’m not even sure since when. Since my dad walked out the door when I was small and didn’t come back.

Since no one believed in us, no one except our nan. She was our saving grace at least. She stopped us from falling totally between the cracks.

But I’m
not
a blank. I have feelings and emotions – and I’m not sure what to do with any of them now. It’s like I’ve gone into free fall.

I thank God that Scarlett is at least safe with her mother. And Frankie’s happy in France, and he has Jenna now and Marlena too, of course. Marlena will always be there for him, and she won’t ever leave him, I’m sure of that.

It was always borrowed time for me. I’ve always known the clock was counting down.

M
y phone rings
as I tramp back up the field.

I avoid Ruth’s friendly wave, bouncing spaniel at her feet, as I reach the cottage. I don’t like to be rude, but I am beyond caring now, as I go not home but to the place I’ve been lent.

I drink the end of the bottle of cider Matthew bought, and I text both Scarlett and Frankie.

I tell Frankie how much I love him and to take care and to not drink too much wine in the vineyard.

I tell Scarlett I’m sorry I wasn’t more help, and I hope she’s all right – and that she’s left her copy of
Rebecca
here.

Then I get in the car, and I put my glasses on to read the coordinates I was left, and I type them into my phone.

I drive out, towards Dovedale.

I might not have time to drink the whisky I’ve put in my bag, the half bottle Jon left in the cupboard, but at least I might have the option. It’s some sort of pathetic reassurance.

I’m so tired – so tired of it all.

All I want is for this nightmare to be over.

Lying in bed last night, I heard the owl again. It was a strange, sad noise – but I find it oddly comforting to think of the owl out there now, his great wingspan pale against the night sky as I drive out of Ashbourne and into the wilds, towards the beautiful desolate peaks that I don’t belong in either.

It really hurt when he said I was a blank, you know. It really hurt me.

So I surrender.

S
he can’t be dead
.

I am in the bath when the call comes.

She can’t fucking well be dead
.

I rarely get in the bath. Showers suit me: quicker, harsher; God knows I am not lily white and I need that blast, that sting, to be washed cleaner – but a bath allows me time to think.

True it’s time I don’t normally want, that I normally avoid, but right now I
have
to think – debating what to do about Nasreen.

Turkey brought no answers about her, though it did have interesting leads on other stories.

Back here, frustrated by the useless fucking police, I met Nasreen’s boyfriend, Lenny, last night in the grotty pub on the corner of his road. I bought him a pint or two of Stella and chatted about how they met and how much he missed her. At one point I watched his dull eyes fill with tears.

‘Nas’s parents hate me,’ he said, his top lip pulled back over his teeth in a snarl, and I thought,
I don’t blame them really.
‘They wanted a nice Muslim boy.’

‘Ah dear,’ I said sympathetically, but what I was really thinking was,
Why did she want
you? Were you simply an act of rebellion? An ill-chosen symbol? Handsome – a catch, perhaps, in looks at least, for a naïve teenage girl – but sullen and tense beneath the surface. Not a good catch in reality.

I bought him a shot of tequila to go with his pint, and we played a game of pool. I’m really fucking good at pool actually; I can thank my misspent youth for that. I relish the look on men’s faces when I smack the black in – but this time I let Lenny win.

Him having the upper hand seemed vital at that moment.

It meant I had to put up with all those pissed blokes grafted to their bar stools exuding pity, scorn and superiority – but it was worth it, if it got Lenny on side.

Halfway through the second pint, Lenny was sweating profusely, but it wasn’t that hot. Not that hot at all in the air-conditioned pub.

There’s still no evidence. They’ve questioned him; they’ve taken away his computer – there’s nothing. It was him that told the family she’d been talking to someone in Syria online, that he’d caught her, and they’d been talking about jihad and Islamic State.

But if he thought that, if he was worried, why the fuck didn’t he act whilst she was still around? I asked him that last night – but he couldn’t really answer. ‘I thought she loved me,’ he whined. ‘Me not Allah.’

I am just waiting for him to trip up.

So now I lie in the bath with eyes closed and ponder why they can’t find the dirt on this bloke – and then my mobile rings in the other room. I ignore it. It never stops ringing.

Then the bloody landline rings. Now that
never
rings. Only Jeanie has this number – her and Frank.

The answerphone picks up.

‘This is a message for Marlena Randall,’ a northern female voice says: tentative, clipped. ‘This is WPC Evans at Derby Central. We’d like to talk to you about your sister, Jeanie King. Please call me back urgently.’

I’m frozen in the steaming bath as she reads a number out, and I find I can’t move my limbs; they are so heavy they are like wax. They won’t move…

Then I manage to scramble out, slipping, dripping across the tiles and the floorboards in the main room, and I snatch up the receiver. ‘I’m here,’ I croak. ‘I’m here…’

The voice speaks.

‘She can’t have done,’ I hear myself say, and the echo is in the room, bouncing off the walls. ‘Don’t be so bloody stupid.’

When I put the phone down again minutes later, someone is yelling – and then I realise.

I realise it’s me.

S
o
.

I know what you’re thinking; I do, really.

You think I really fucked up, don’t you? That I should have been there, that I wasn’t – that it’s my fault.

Don’t look at me like that please.

And you know this is what I’d say to anyone who asked. I’d say:
Fuck!
I really thought I’d seen it all – but I hadn’t.

T
he next day

I
t’s
the simplicity with which she was living that kind of breaks my heart, you know, when I arrive at her cottage. It’s kind of like something from a sweet folk tale or Beatrix Potter – Goldilocks poking round the three bears’ stuff, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, that kind of nice cosy lovely thing that childhoods ought to be made up of.

Honey stoned and blue doored, in the middle of a row of four, roses round the door and pansies outside in the terracotta pots. Fields and fields of bloody green space out the back; a terrifying amount of space.

And what really gets to me now, what brings the fucking lump to my throat, is how there’s only one of everything in the meticulous kitchen. She was always so tidy, where I am such a messy cow. The little one, the baby, I got used to her picking up my pants, cooking for me, sorting stuff – you know the score. I got used to Jeanie being there. Jeanie’s always been bloody there.

I’m not sure why it’s her little pot of raspberry jam laid out by her single plate, alongside her single knife – why it’s that that makes me cry. Why is it that? After all, there’s only one of everything in my place too. We are the original singletons: just not à la Bridget Jones.

Indelible, the damage our parents did to us, etched into us, marking us forever. Why would we
ever
want to place our hearts in others’ hands? I can’t do it; I never have.

Jeanie is the only person I really trust – and now look what she’s bloody gone and done.

Don’t. Don’t even say it. I know now, too late, how remiss I’ve been.

Except… She did do it, didn’t she? That’s been the whole problem. She dared to put her heart in his hands – that tosser, Matthew – and Jesus, now look. Just look at this mess.

I kick the washing machine. I kick it and I kick it.

Her neighbour, Ruth, found the note in the early hours, alerted by the constantly banging front door, seemingly left ajar.

It’s just Jeanie that’s missing. Just the body that’s not here.

I kick the washing machine some more until there’s a huge fucking dent in it.

And then the officer at the door coughs gently, and I turn towards her.

We get in the police car, and we continue the search for my sister.

One, a special constable it seems, mutters to the other, ‘Twice up here in two days. There was that biker last night…’

The other frowns.

The first one says, ‘Did you see the blood in the bathroom?’ and then the other casts a furtive look at me in the mirror, hushing her colleague.

We drive on in silence, only the crackling police radio for company.

T
he day is drawing in
, just a thin line of light left across the horizon, when the call comes.

Apparently a sheep farmer from Castern saw a woman walking near the bridge over the river Dove late last night as he drove back up to his farm. He thought she looked a bit unsteady on her feet, but he was on his way to check his sheep after a call about a savage dog roaming the fields. In the ensuing drama the woman slipped his mind. But this evening he found a rucksack in another one of his fields, below Thorpe Cloud, near a shepherd’s hut. And a pair of broken glasses.

They might be Jeanie’s.

As we drive down the ploddingly windy roads, the radio crackles to say they’ve found someone.

‘Is she alive?’ I keep asking frantically. ‘Please – is she alive?’

‘Please, Miss Randall,’ the WPC repeats, ashen faced as her colleague drives faster. ‘Let’s just wait till we get there, all right?’

Then she turns the radio off so I can’t hear anything more.

B
y the time
we get out there, the bewildered farmer is being led off for questioning. Halfway up the track, an ambulance is parked as near to the stone hut as it can get, and as I scramble up the hill, I see them carry a stretcher to the door.

‘Jeanie, I’m coming!’ I’m screaming, falling and righting myself and falling again. ‘Jeanie! I’m here. It’s all right!’

But of course it’s not all right, is it? It really, really isn’t all right.

They give me the broken glasses later, and the twisted frame breaks my heart. They are so pathetic. They are Jeanie.

L
ater
.

When I can catch my breath.

When I’ve gone in the ambulance to Derby and they’ve taken her off and she’s not moved a hair, an inch, a muscle, a nerve ending.

When I’ve felt like I should call someone but don’t know who. When I’ve seen my big sister Jean looking very small; tubed up, gowned up, not breathing for herself any more but hooked up to a machine that’s doing the breathing for her, her face as white as the sheets she lies between. When I’ve sat holding her limp hand, berating both of us for this sorry state of affairs – but mainly myself of course. When I’ve smoked fags out the front next to the women with bad roots and pink towelling robes, shuffling in slippers, I catch a cab, and I go back to the cottage.

I try to think logically.

They showed me the note earlier: it was baldly simple and written in printed capitals.

But why? Why now, exactly?

Because of Matthew? Really? Would it affect her to this degree, the heartbreak?

But maybe it was the final straw, after the hell that was Simon, twelve years ago. And then the Seaborne business – and then Prince Charming – who turned out to just be fucked-up Matthew.

Given the crap we grew up in, it’s amazing really how high functioning she was, how she kept going most of the time. Because she had to. Because one of us had to.

Would she really have left Frankie? That’s what haunts me, more than anything. I have to tell Frankie – and soon.

I go through everything in the house.

It doesn’t take long to find the diary in her bedroom, tangled in the bed sheets – but it’s almost brand new I realise, as I tear through it; only been started this week.

So where’s the one before? That’s the one I need.

It’ll all be there in black and white I imagine. Where are the secrets of her heart?

Some time after I start searching I stop and drink the dregs of a bottle of wine in the kitchen – acidic Sauvignon Blanc that I hate and she likes – and then I check the time.

It’s dark outside now, but I walk down into Ashbourne and buy a bottle of vodka just before the off licence shuts.

I trudge back up the hill with it, spooked by the darkness of the countryside.

I sit at her table, and I drink the vodka neat, and I read the brief contents of the diary again, looking for clues.

There’s hardly anything though.

When I finish I go outside, and I smoke a cigarette, sitting on the bench in the tiny front garden. The sky is very big here, and there are hundreds of stars, and all the space scares me. It’s not natural.

I hear an owl hooting, and it makes me shiver. It’s an unearthly noise, and I think,
God, where are all the people and the buildings and the light?

I think of her life in the few pages I’ve just read, and I think,
Why the hell didn’t she tell me about this campaign of terror she was living under?

She did try though, didn’t she?
Come on, Marlena,
I think,
you know she bloody did. Innocent Jeanie.
Always willing to believe the best of people – and letting them make her feel like shit.

I feel the tears start again, and I dash them away impatiently. I don’t have time for this. I have to find out what happened.

Otherwise I will go as mad as…

As mad as Jeanie has. But what is it that pushed her over the edge in the end?

Okay – so that’s a no-brainer. I wince as I think of the BBC news site. Presumably Matthew and the abuse allegation was too much for her.

I light another cigarette, thinking, thinking, thinking. The vodka has made my head a little fuzzy, but I’m well used to drinking on the job.

Why
was the daughter here the other day? That really puzzles me. This girl who was so close to her mother that she hated Jeanie at first, that she blew this hot and cold.

Why would Scarlett come to Jeanie, all the way up north, when she hated her at times? When Robo had just found out it was her sending the poisonous messages, trying to take Jeanie down?

Did she come to destroy her?

I need to find her, this Scarlett, and talk to her. I need her to explain. And I need to know what was going on with her and her father. I fear that this is what has pushed Jeanie to this point.

But another thought is there.

The thought that Scarlett could be involved in a worse way than might seem obvious.

But it can’t be that.

Can it? A fifteen-year-old girl couldn’t try to kill someone, remotely… No, it doesn’t add up…

And the police obviously don’t think anything untoward has happened. All the pills and the whisky bottle in the rucksack were signs enough for them: the writing was on the wall. Or in the medicine cabinet, rattling with pills – above the fresh blood on the carpet.

And Christ, how bad do I feel that I didn’t even know Jeanie had slid back down the slope?

I mean, I knew she started again after the whole Otto Lundy episode; I knew she was prescribed various things, that at one point she was taking all sorts of antidepressants. And that wasn’t the first time. After Simon, things got so bad I had Frankie for a short time whilst she got well. And for years she was well. For years – until Otto.

After Otto she was seriously depressed for a while. With good reason: she lost her job. Her reputation. Her livelihood and her reason – other than Frankie – to be.

I helped her out, got her back on her feet. She had some savings, thank God, because she was always cautious.

In the main, it was the thought of Frankie that got her through – him just being there.

I did try, at one point, to get Jeanie to see a shrink, but she refused. She seemed better. ‘I may be sad, but I’m not mad.’ She even smiled about it, and I believed her. She thought therapy was ‘trendy’ and ‘faddy’ – and her response annoyed me, but she knew her own mind, my big sister, for all her kindnesses.