‘Come into the greenhouse, Enelle,’ Dad says after he has grinned and grinned at his grandchildren.
‘Put that down and go and wash your hands!’ Mum shrieks.
‘But we don’t need to,’ Willow says.
‘We were only in the car,’ Clara adds.
‘And we all went to the toilet and washed our hands before we got in the car,’ Aubrey explains.
Whereas Dad is going to have fun, Mum is probably going to be more than a little stressed out with keeping on top of their hygiene. But that will do her good, too, I’m sure.
Dad’s place to talk is his greenhouse. It was the stockroom at the Hove shop when we still had it, but in recent years it is this large place with real glass panels. Those real glass panels can be controlled so when he is growing stuff that needs to be protected from direct sunlight he can dim the place with the flick of a switch.
‘Where is your sister, Enelle?’ My father asks the second the greenhouse door has shut behind me. He is staring at me like he knows everything about what I’ve been doing and is waiting for me to answer his question before he rains down hell on me.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy. I don’t know where she is,’ I say.
My dad looks me over, from head to toe, then back up again. I’ve let him down. It’s clear on his lined face, imprinted on every crease that has developed since he walked into the police station to pick up his daughter twenty-five years ago.
‘Is this something to do with what you’ve been doing all these years?’ he asks.
I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so.’ Beyond what I told him about looking for Jude and talking to the Daltons, Dad has never really asked me what I’m doing. He has always been interested in my work at The Super, he has always asked if I had a significant other, he’s even asked if I was thinking of becoming a mother, but he has never asked what I have been doing. ‘She was upset with Shane and me, mostly me, and left.’
‘Did you have relations with Shane?’ he asks.
My eyes become like beach balls in my head, they widen so much. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I know you and Macenna think that your mother and I live on a different planet to the pair of you, but before we were parents we were young people too. I have seen how Shane looks at you sometimes. Did you have relations with him?’
‘No, Daddy, no .’ I cringe at the idea that my dad would think it, let alone ask me about it. And I can’t stand for him to say the word ‘relations’ meaning sex again. ‘I went out with Shane nearly …’ I try to calculate it in my head so I don’t inadvertently tell my dad I had sex when I was sixteen ‘… Nearly twenty years ago. But nothing since then. Macy thought we might still have feelings for each other, but we don’t. At all. If you’ve seen Shane look at me, it’s awkwardness. We both feel odd around each other after all these years. But he loves Macy. She’s the only one for him.’ I shudder at the idea that my dad thinks I would do that to my sister. ‘I wouldn’t do that to her. I just wouldn’t. He wouldn’t, either. Everything is a mess. But not that much of a mess.’
‘Tell me about this mess,’ he says. This is the first time, the first time I’ve had a conversation with my dad. We talk all the time, but I’m usually keeping stuff from him, by trying to project the image of being a good daughter. I’ve never really spoken to him before like he is another adult who I can open up to. This is what Shane was trying to say – I am closed off to most people. I can’t be honest with most people because there is always something I have to hold back. Not the normal way people hold back, not the polite way of not overwhelming others with too much information about your life, but this is almost calculated. Every conversation I have is necessarily modulated and controlled so as not to reveal too much about myself.
‘I can’t. Not yet. Not all of it,’ I say to my dad.
‘Why not?’
‘Because … I just can’t, Daddy. I’m trying to sort all these things out, and things keep happening that make it harder.’ Those things, of course, being someone trying to harm me and John Pope hanging a threat over my head .
‘Go to the police,’ Dad says simply.
For him, after all he went through, to say that must mean he can see how serious it is, despite all the minimisation I have done.
‘I can’t. I’ve nothing to take to them.’
‘Let them decide that,’ he says. What strength must it take for him to say that to me? I always knew my dad was the strongest person ever, and he’s proving it to me once again.
‘I will, Daddy, once I have things clear in my mind I will think about going to the police.’
My father stares at me. He’s going to say something else, something profound and life-altering, I can tell by the way he hesitates, the look in his eye, the way his face is set. ‘Be careful’ is what he actually says. ‘Take care of yourself.’
I’m disappointed, and also mollified. This is probably what it’s like to converse with me – you know there is something big I could say, something huge I’m often on the verge of saying, and then I pull away. ‘I will,’ I utter.
‘We will take care of the children. Even if it is for more than a week.’
‘Thank you. Macy might contact you, and you can tell her that the kids are here.’
‘I will.’
‘Right, I’d better go back and help Mummy with getting them settled in,’ I say.
‘That’s a very diplomatic way of putting it,’ Dad laughs.
He reaches out and puts his arm around my shoulders, then briefly, very briefly squeezes me towards his body. The second time I remember my dad initiating that kind of physical contact. The first time was when he took me home from the police station.
Nell
Monday, 28 May
‘Nell! Oh my—I’ve been going out of my mind with worry about you.’ Aaron practically grabs me through his front door and holds me in his arms. ‘Are you all right?’ he asks.
He doesn’t let me go and, for a moment, I forget who he is enough to fold my arms around him, rest my head on his chest and relax. This is what I miss about being with Zach. I miss someone holding me, comforting me. I didn’t have it for very long with him, but I miss being held like it was something that happened every day of my life. I’ve slept around not only because of what Pope called me, but to have human contact. I wanted another’s touch, the chance to simply be with someone.
Aaron’s hands move on my body – one to my lower back, the other to the back of my head – like he knows that’s where I love to be held, like he’s done this before. He takes a huge breath in and then sighs to release it, almost as though this is everything he’s ever wanted.
I need, right now, to have someone make me feel like this – to have someone make me believe that I am wanted and I am not a screw-up. I snuggle closer to him and he holds me tighter. After a few seconds I pull my head away and look at him. He gazes down at me.
Against my body, I can feel his breathing become shallow and fast, as though he is trying to control himself.
Go on, then , I think, because it’s clear he wants to kiss me. I’m not going to pull away. Go on, do it .
His eyes search my face, looking for a hint of doubt, any indication that I don’t want this. What he sees makes him release me and step away instead of kissing me.
He clears his throat and runs his hand through his hair, and I lower my gaze. Embarrassed. I’m completely mortified that Aaron realised that I would allow him to kiss me, I would probably let him take it so much further, but it would all be driven by him. I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about it, I wouldn’t be desperate to be with him, not like I was for those few minutes in the car when we came back from Leeds. It must have been obvious from my face that I would be going along with it because I need someone to make me feel better.
‘Where’ve you been?’ he asks. ‘I’ve been so worried about you. You just disappeared and didn’t answer your phone. Someone at your flats said you’d moved out after you’d been burgled and attacked by rats
or something.’
‘I’ve been to Messed Up and Broken via the scenic route of Completely Screwed Up My Life.’
‘What? What are you talking about?’ Aaron says.
‘Everything has gone wrong since we came back from Leeds.’
‘Tell me about it – someone tried to run me over last week.’
‘What? Are you all right? What happened?’
‘I was coming back from the train station. I’d just got to the end of the crescent as you turn into this road and I heard a car suddenly speed up. It took me straight back to what I heard on the day my dad was run over. My first instinct was to run, but instead, I stopped and stepped back. Then I turned and ran for it in the direction I came from. I looked back briefly and saw the car mount the pavement and swerve to just where I would have been if I had carried on walking or run for it.’
My whole body feels weak at the idea of what could have happened to him if he hadn’t heard his dad’s accident on the phone. Those traumatic few seconds on the phone five years ago have probably saved his life.
The iron girdle is back around my chest. Breathe, Nell. Breathe. Speak, Nell. Speak . ‘Someone did the same to Sadie,’ I manage. ‘She’s in a coma. I haven’t rung back. I’m too scared in case she’s died.’
Aaron slaps his hand on his forehead and takes another step backwards. ‘What’s going on, Nell? What have we stumbled into?’
‘I have no idea. I haven’t even told you what happened to me.’
‘What, that story your neighbour told me was real?’
I explain briefly what happened and as I talk, I start to get a tingly sensation all over my body. What if Macy didn’t just leave – what if she was stolen? Magicked away like Jude was, never to be heard from again. No. No, the note sounded like it was from her, it was in her handwriting and only she would have said that I was taking over her life.
‘I’m so glad you’re all right,’ Aaron says, and I’m sure he shoves his hands deep into his trousers pockets to avoid touching me.
‘I’m not sure I am, actually.’ I close my eyes, to try to picture the family tree printouts from my flat. Were the Brighton Mermaid and Jude ones still there? I can’t remember. I open my eyes again in frustration. There is something there that I have found that I don’t realise I have found. What is it?
I have almost all my files on my laptop and on a USB drive that never leaves my person. I am bothered by the stolen computer hard drives, but not from a data point of view, because all of that is long gone. When Aaron and I started to work together, and he told me about computers, he’d made me buy some that were unhackable if I was careful. I needed a special key fob to open them as well as a password. If anyone attempted to break into the computer or physically take it away to work on, everything would be erased. He also showed me how to set up a private virtual network for accessing the Internet. And when we did email it was through a service that is based in Switzerland and is virtually unhackable.
Our only vulnerabilities really are the text messages, but that is why he keeps them short: ‘He needs to see you’ and, latterly, ‘Call me’.
When Aaron started talking about all this stuff, I thought he was not only unrealistically paranoid but had also managed to convince himself he was the star of an espionage drama that he was trying to drag me into. I also thought he was being rather free with my limited funds. But it didn’t hurt to be a bit more cautious about what I did online and I’m glad, right now, that I did go along with it, because it looks like he was right all along.
‘I have to go back to my flat,’ I say. ‘I have to see if there are files missing. At first I just thought everything had been trashed, but now I’m thinking some of it might have been stolen.’ I shake my head. ‘I took most of them with me, though, to Leeds.’
‘You’re acting as though any of this normal,’ Aaron says. ‘It’s not. None of this is normal.’
‘Let me think, let me think,’ I say, closing my eyes again. The reason why I ended up being able to help other people with their searches was because I could stand back and see all of their problem and which roadblocks needed to be navigated. I need to think about all of this like an outsider would.
My problem has always been that I am too close to the Brighton Mermaid, to my missing best friend, to deconstruct the problem. I’ve always believed that it wasn’t my dad so it must have been someone else. But then, is that being fair to my dad? I’ve always been so desperate to keep him out of it, what if he is at the heart of it? No, no, I’m doing it again. I’m centring these searches on me and those close to me. I need to step back.
‘Aaron,’ I say, opening my eyes, ‘who did you tell that we were going to Leeds?’
‘No one,’ he says.
‘I didn’t tell anyone. We never emailed or texted about it, I only did the searches on my private network after I started it here on your virtually unhackable computers. So, who did you tell? Or are we dismantling your computers to find the bug, seeing as mine are long gone?’
‘I didn’t tell anyone,’ he insists.
‘Where did you tell your father you were going that day?’
‘Well, obviously I told him. I thought it would get him to back off about the six-month thing. It was something tangible, what he was asking for. I mean I didn’t tell anyone other than him.’
‘I believe you,’ I say. ‘But who did he tell?’
‘No one. He hardly sees anyone; even most of his old colleagues have stopped coming by to see him. He won’t have told anyone.’
Sometimes Aaron forgets who his father is. I step around him, heading straight for the garden patio, where Pope sits with a blanket over his knees. Today his radio is on, tuned to some talk channel, and a book has been left face down beside his glass of whiskey.
‘Who did you tell about Sadie in Leeds?’ I say to him.
He looks up at me with those sharp blue eyes. He looks at me how he always looks at me: disgust coated with fascination, like oil slicked on the surface of water.
Pope hasn’t demanded an audience with me today, so he reaches for his glass and looks to the right of me to pretend I don’t exist. It’s usually fine when he pretends I’m not there, when he doesn’t bother to speak to me, but what he’s done has hurt someone, has ruined my life, almost got his son killed. Today he has to speak to me on my terms.
I step into his line of vision, closer to the table, and then I snap off the radio to halt the droning chatter that is filling the air. ‘Who. Did. You. Tell.’ I want to clap my hands in his face to get him to focus.
He cuts his eyes at me and then sips his drink.
‘I know you don’t care about anyone but yourself, so I won’t bother telling you that the woman we spoke to in Leeds is in a coma after someone ran her over. I won’t tell you about how someone broke into my flat and then sent me a dead rat so I can’t live there, but I will tell you that someone tried to kill your son. I know that doesn’t bother you, because it’s not you after all, but if they try again, and they manage to hurt him next time, you’re going to end up with no one to take care of you. ’Cos even if he’s “just” injured, he won’t be able to fetch and carry for you.’
As I thought, that gets his attention, enough to make him focus on me while he sips his drink.
‘Who did you tell?’ I ask again.
‘Just a couple of my friends.’
‘You were never going to give me six months, were you? Certainly not a year. You were just waiting for something that would allow you to try to kick off an investigation, weren’t you? You made an official call, to what, the cold case team? They probably just ran a few checks to see if you were wasting their time.’ I shake my head. ‘You bastard,’ I say quietly. ‘You absolute bastard.’
I look at Aaron. ‘He’s done it. He’s pulled the trigger and now it’s out there. The police now have a link, a name that might help them identify the Brighton Mermaid. Which is probably why whoever is doing this had to get rid of Sadie. They had to stop her fr
om talking to the police, potentially giving them a name that might reveal who the Brighton Mermaid was. Because if we find out who she was, we potentially find out who she was with before she died. Your father couldn’t wait, no, he had to go off half-cocked. That’s why we’re all under attack. We don’t know enough yet to do whoever the killer is enough damage, but we know enough for them to want to stop us.
‘And the worst part is we have no idea who it is. In other words, for whoever killed the Brighton Mermaid and all those other mermaids, it’s open season on all of us. And he’s done that.’
Pope doesn’t say anything. I’m not sure if he doesn’t want to condescend to speak to me or if what I’ve said has shaken him up. But I’m scared because what he’s done has meant literally anyone out there knows about us and we are all in danger.
‘OK,’ I say to Aaron, who is visibly shell-shocked. He probably didn’t believe his father would do something like this. ‘Right, since this is a panic situation, clearly we’re going to have to go a bit further than we intended. I’m going to my flat to see which of my papers are still there and which are missing. When I come back, you’ll have to—’ I stop talking and glare at Pope. ‘Sorry, almost made the same mistake again there. Come on, I’ll tell you on the way to my place.’
‘I need your help, Boy,’ Pope says without even looking at his son. He is only speaking because he knows Aaron will do whatever he wants him to whenever he wants it. Not any more. I’ve had enough of Aaron being treated like that by this man. I know Aaron will have, too. I’ve seen him change over the last couple of years. He’s grown stronger; he’s started to see a life away from his father.
‘He can’t help you right now, he’s busy,’ I say.
‘Boy, I need you to stay here.’ Pope is scowling at me, his simmering hatred fuelling this attempt to dismantle me.
The only thing that is going to be broken here is Pope’s hold over his son. Aaron is on the road to doing it – he just needs a hand to keep going.
‘Didn’t you hear me?’ I repeat, as though he is hard of hearing. ‘He can’t help you right now. He’s coming with me. If you needed his help so badly, you should have thought of that before you started shooting your mouth off and making it necessary for us to now travel in pairs.’