“But she talks about Scarlett now?”
Annie gave a short laugh, and turned to look at Lou for the first time since they’d left the VVS. “It’s the only thing she does talk about. The only thing. Every day. “When’s Scarlett coming home?” It drives everyone mad. She doesn’t acknowledge us at all anymore. That’s why we think she’s going to find it hard to deal with her actual return. She’s not the same Scarlett that Juliette remembers, is she?”
They got stuck in traffic, of course. It was only a couple of miles across town but a bin lorry appeared to have broken down in the middle of a pedestrian crossing and there was gridlock either side of it.
“Are you going to try to talk to Clive?” Annie said. “I can’t say he’ll be pleased to see you again. You were the one who was always hanging around the house.”
“Yes,” Lou said, trying to make light of the less-than-favorable description.
“He was in a bad place back then. You can’t blame him.”
“No, I don’t. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for both of you, coming home from Greece without your daughter. But Clive just didn’t want to be interviewed, did he?”
“He saw it as wasting time. He thought you should all have been out there looking for her, not asking stupid questions. You all kept asking us the same questions, over and over. It was like nobody was listening to the answers.”
I was listening, Lou thought. I listened to everything. None of it made sense.
The traffic ahead cleared and a few minutes later Lou pulled up outside the house. It had stopped raining, thank goodness. Annie was staring up at the hedge as though she’d been away for months. Somewhere nearby, someone was digging up the road or drilling; the noise reverberated around the neighborhood, then mercifully stopped.
“It’s a nice house,” Lou said, her voice suddenly loud.
“Yes. And nice to get home after a holiday, isn’t it?”
Lou watched her face, trying to read the unreadable. “Here’s my card,” she said. “You can ring me anytime, if there’s anything you want to talk about. I’ll give you a call in a day or so, maybe to talk to Clive and Juliette. Would that be okay?”
Annie nodded, distracted. She was still looking up at the house. “Has she been here?”
“Has who been here?”
“Scarlett. Did she sleep here last night?”
Of all the questions, Lou thought. How would they have got inside? Break in, just so Scarlett could sleep in her old room without anyone else there?
“No. She hasn’t been here since . . .” Since you all left for Greece, she thought. And left the sentence hanging.
She tried again. “Is there anything else you need, Annie? Anything you’d like to ask?”
That seemed to do the trick. Annie looked away at last, opened the door and got out. “No—no. Thank you for the lift. It’s very kind of you.”
Lou waited, watching Annie who was standing by the gate, rooting around in her oversized shoulder bag, presumably for her keys. A green Volvo was on the driveway; Clive and Juliette must have got back from the airport too.
The drilling started up again, and Lou drove away.
What was Annie so afraid of? And was it even that—was it fear? After so many years in “the Job,” so many interviews and meetings and discussions with all manner of individuals, Lou believed she was good at reading people, good at interpreting emotional states and even better at exploiting them to get the best possible resolution. No, “exploiting” was the wrong word. Turning situations to an advantage, perhaps. You couldn’t rely on someone to behave in a particular way just because you yourself would act like that in a given situation. But, even so, there were certain things you could expect: a missing child would cause grief, panic, hysteria, numbness . . . and any number of other reactions. But what Annie had displayed instead had been quite different.
The family’s strange behavior had given the original investigation team cause for concern, and for a long time one of the main lines of inquiry had been that Clive—and Annie—had been responsible for Scarlett’s death and the disposal of her body. They’d been so weird, it had made everyone think they were hiding something. Lou had worked through her allocated investigative tasks, all the time thinking through the options and considering why they might be behaving as they were. She’d thought about Annie being afraid of Clive, but that didn’t seem to fit. Clive wasn’t afraid of Annie, either. They interacted with each other as a perfectly normal family—but with any outsiders they were—well, odd.
She couldn’t read Annie. She hadn’t been able to read her all those years ago, and even less so now.
SAM
Friday 1 November 2013, 17:30
Caro had gone out to get food when the Social Services woman came back. She had brought a bag of clothes for Scarlett, which were glanced at and discarded at the other end of the sofa.
“I’ve got my own sodding clothes,” she said. “I don’t need any cast-off shit.”
“I’ll see if I can sort out a visit to the house where you were living, so you can collect some stuff,” Sam said. “Won’t be till tomorrow, though.”
Scarlett shrugged. “I don’t care. I do want my phone back, though. Bastards took it. It’s got all my phone numbers in it.” She fixed Sam with an accusing stare.
“I’ll ask tomorrow,” Sam said. Not lying, exactly. She could still ask, even if she knew already what the answer was going to be. “You were telling me about Nico.”
“I wasn’t. Your boss mentioned him, not me.”
“You met him on holiday,” Sam prompted. “It’s just that nobody else—the family I mean—talked about him. Did you keep him a secret?”
Scarlett glanced out of the window, as if Annie might be there, listening in. “No. They all knew.”
“Why do you think they didn’t tell us you’d met someone?”
She picked at a thumbnail, studying it closely, before answering. “No idea. You’ll have to ask them. Did your lot interview him? Nico, I mean.”
“No. They never located him.”
Scarlett gave a short, humorless laugh. “Not surprised.”
The front door opened and closed, and Sam heard Caro talking to Orla in the kitchen. Moments later Caro came in with fish and chips, three packets of it, cans of Pepsi, a big tub of table salt and a bottle of ketchup. The smell of the chips made Sam realize how hungry she was.
“They have chips with mayo in Holland,” Scarlett said, unwrapping and chewing. “I thought I liked it at the time. They never asked if I wanted ketchup—it always just came with mayo.”
“Nothing like red sauce with chips,” Caro said cheerfully.
“I guess it’s good to have a choice,” said Sam.
Scarlett stopped chewing. After a moment she put the open packet of food down onto the coffee table, cracked open a can and drank. Belched.
“Talking of choice . . . you do need to have a think about what’s next, Scarlett,” Caro said. “Where you’re going to go. Think about your options, decide what you want to do.”
Scarlett was motionless, staring at Caro. There was a fiery ball of emotion there, being held back, and Sam recognized that the energy Scarlett was expending just holding herself together was fuelling it. She was going to explode, and there was something about the last part of the conversation that had just lit the fuse.
She got to her feet. “I need to go,” she said.
“What?” Caro asked. “Go where?”
But Scarlett was already out of the door, flinging it open so hard that the door handle cracked the plaster on the wall, running, running from the room to the hallway, flinging that door open as well. By the time Sam had reacted and followed her, Scarlett was halfway down the street, running down the middle of the road.
She was fast—God, she was fast. Sam was struggling to catch up, realizing that she was losing ground. How’s she so fit? The air was cold enough to make Sam’s lungs burn with it.
“Wait!” Sam
shouted, trying to get her to slow down at least, or stop.
“Fuck off!” Scarlett screamed, without looking back. “Leave me alone!”
At the end of the road Scarlett turned abruptly left into an alleyway. Sam followed, running as hard as she could to catch up. She didn’t know this part of town well, but when she turned the corner Sam realized the alleyway led directly into Memorial Park. Darkness, trees, a playground, a boating lake, a café, which would be closed, of course—where the hell was she going?
By the time Sam got through the metal gate that was supposed to be locked but regularly got broken open, Scarlett had disappeared. Beyond was blackness, nothing but a few feet of path in front of her, streetlights ahead in the distance. Sam stopped, panting hard, coughing, hands on her knees. “Scarlett!”
Sam listened. A dog was barking somewhere in the blackness. And then she heard something else. A cry, rising in the chilly air, turning into something unearthly. A wail, a scream.
“Scarlett!” Sam followed the path ahead, trying a light jog.
“I said piss off!” The voice came from up ahead, high-pitched, ending on a sob. “Leave me alone!”
As Sam’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she could make out shapes: trees, bushes, the edge of the grass. A bench, with a dark shape hunched at one end of it. Sam made for the bench, sat at the other end. She could hear Scarlett’s breath, coming in jerky spasms.
“She has no idea,” Scarlett said. “Choice! What choice have I got? What choice have I ever had? It’s a fucking joke . . .”
Sam said nothing. She waited, while Scarlett cried and cried. After several minutes the breathing began to even out again and the sobs subsided. Sam found a tissue in the pocket of her jeans, passed it down to the other end of the bench.
“Why are you even still here?” Scarlett said, snatching the tissue.
“I’m not sure,” Sam said cautiously.
“What sort of an answer’s that?”
“I don’t want to presume I know what’s best for you, Scarlett. But in the meantime I’m just going to hang around in case there’s anything you need that I can provide. Like, you know, a tissue.”
“What I need is my bloody phone back. I have got mates, you know. I could be at Reg’s house, watching Sky Movies and entertaining his kid, instead of being holed up in a grotty police house with a bunch of jobsworths.”
“We may be jobsworths but at least we’re giving you free food, and a hotel room.”
Scarlett made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Don’t make me laugh. It’s the Travel Inn. It’s hardly the bloody Ritz, is it?” There was a pause. “Fucking freezing out here. I left my coat behind.”
“Shall we head back?”
“In a minute.”
She was taking deep breaths. Steeling herself to go back.
“I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been, seeing your mother again.”
In the dim light Sam could see Scarlett’s head turn to face her. “I bet nobody else sees it like that: difficult. Everyone seems to expect me to be bloody overjoyed.”
“If you’d wanted to see her, you would have done it before now, wouldn’t you?”
“Exactly. The only person I want to see is Juliette, and the trouble is I can’t see her without seeing them first.”
“Haven’t you tried to contact Juliette, since you’ve been back?”
There was a long pause. “You don’t know them. They would have found out.”
“So you haven’t contacted anyone at all?”
“Nobody.”
“Were they keeping you prisoner, Scarlett?” It was not meant as an accusation. As soon as she’d uttered the words Sam regretted them, thinking it too much of a challenge. But Scarlett didn’t take it that way.
“No. They were all right to me most of the time. I don’t think you lot understand what it’s like, being dead for ten years. It’s actually quite liberating. It’s suddenly being alive again that’s hard work.”
Abruptly Scarlett stood up.
“I’m ready to go back now.”
She started walking toward the gate, Sam beside her. When they were out on the road again, under the streetlights, Sam saw her hugging her arms across her chest. She was small—tiny, really. Like her mother. Sam’s heart lurched. She wanted to give her a big hug, tell her it was okay, that things would get better.
“Why does your mother dress like a teenager?” Sam asked.
Scarlett didn’t look up. “She’s just weird.”
As they approached the house, Scarlett’s steps slowed.
“Okay?” Sam asked.
Scarlett shook her head vigorously.
“Come on,” Sam coaxed. “It’ll be all right. I’ll sit with you for a bit, shall I?”
“Can you make her go away?” Scarlett asked, her voice just a whisper.
“Who? Caro?”
Scarlett nodded. “She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t get it.”
“You should try and explain it to her, then. Or to me.”
“Maybe.”
At the doorway, Sam paused. “You go on in,” she said. “I’ll follow you in a sec.”
Back in her car, Sam rooted through her glovebox for the cheap Pay As You Go handset she’d bought from the supermarket two months ago. She kept it in the car, charged and turned off, just in case she ended up stranded somewhere without a phone, because on more than one occasion she had left her mobile at home or in the office and been lost without it. Of course, since she’d bought this emergency replacement, she’d managed to keep her own phone on her at all times. Right at the back, under a pile of CDs and some windscreen wipes, she found the charger for it, with the wire tie still wrapped around the cord.
Walking back up toward the house, Sam turned on the phone, relieved to see it was fully charged, and dialed her own number. She let it ring in her pocket for a moment before she disconnected.
When she went back inside and into the living room, Scarlett had finished eating and packed away all the cartons and greasy chip paper into the carrier bag. She was watching the news with the sound turned down.
“Here,” Sam said, handing Scarlett the phone and the charger.
“What’s this?”
“It’s my spare phone. It’s got a tenner’s worth of credit on it.”
“You’re giving me a phone?”
“I’m lending you a phone. I just rang mine, so the last number dialed is my number. Keep it safe, right?”
She took the bag of rubbish back to the kitchen. Caro and Orla were in there discussing the shortage of emergency accommodation and whether the magnanimity of the chief constable would stretch to a few more nights in the Travel Inn.
“How is she?” Caro asked.
“She’s okay. Just a bit of a meltdown.”
“Was it something I said?”
“I think it was us trying to get her to make decisions. But it was only the trigger, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“I need to get off home now,” Caro said. “Are you staying?”
“I’ll sit with her for an hour or so,” said Sam. “Then I need to go too.”
She went back through to the living room. Scarlett was playing with the phone. “Wish I could remember people’s numbers. Not much use having a phone without them.”
“I’ll have it back, then, if you don’t want it,” Sam said. “Orla made you a tea.”
She put it down on the coffee table firmly, slopping a little onto the stained formica.
“Thanks.”
“And Caro’s gone, for now. She’ll be back tomorrow.”
Scarlett tucked the little phone into the pocket of her hoodie, leaned her head back against the cushion. “I’m so tired but I don’t want to sleep. I have nightmares. Every single night. It’s exhausting.”
“What sort of nightmares?”
Scarlett didn’t answer straight away. Her eyes closed and Sam was beginning to think she was falling asleep. Then she said, quietly, “I
saw a girl get her head blown off once. They did things like that. If you didn’t do what they wanted, they just—bang—you know. It was so easy for them. I see her all the time—her face. She didn’t know it was going to happen. Sometimes I dream it’s happening to me, it’s my head being blown apart and I can’t feel it; it doesn’t hurt or anything. But I can just see it happening.”
“Does anything make it better?”
“When I get so shattered that I’m too tired to dream. So I stay up as late as I can. Doesn’t always work. What is it you want? What is it you all want me to do?”
Hearing it put so baldly, Sam was taken aback for a moment.
“I mean, you’re all on at me to decide what to do next. You must want something. What is it?”
“We’re trying to find out what happened to you, Scarlett. So we can stop it happening to other people. We need you to give us a statement.”
“About Greece?”
“About everything.”
“And then you’ll leave me alone?”
Sam thought about her response. “You’re an adult, Scarlett. Far as I know, you haven’t done anything wrong. You’re free to walk out anytime, if you want to.”
Scarlett nodded, slowly. “I can’t think straight right now. Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow.”
“I hope so. Scarlett, when your mum arrived, I overheard you say quite a strange thing. You said, “I saw you.” Can you tell me what you meant?”
Sam had chosen her moment deliberately, trying to catch Scarlett off guard. And there was a flicker, a swift look, a moment, and then she composed herself again.
“Oh. I saw her on the telly. Giving an interview about me.”
It was a lie.
“Really? When?”
“Not long after I got taken. I was in a flat somewhere. I saw her being interviewed on the news but the sound was off and the subtitles were in Polish or whatever, so I couldn’t understand what she was saying.”
In the months following Scarlett’s abduction, her parents had been interviewed several times, made appeals, even been on Crimewatch. Annie had never been interviewed without Clive, and as far as Sam could remember Annie had never said more than two or three words.
Back then, Clive had done all the talking.