The Bad Things: A gripping crime thriller full of twists and turns

7

Alex pulled the front door closed behind her and hunched down into her coat, trying to avoid the worst of the east wind and the rain lashing at her face. She loved Sole Bay with its jumble of terraces, semis, and mansions, and the B. & B.s, and the chi-chi shops that sold everything from designer clothes to plastic windmills, but, God, how she hated the winter weather. The wind and rain whipped off the grey North Sea, across the sand, around the beach huts, straight at anyone who dared get in the way. In the summer, the streets were clogged with visitors – the little train running up and down the pier doing good business; barrels of beer were transported to the pubs by a dray pulled by shire horses, and holidaymakers whiled away the day on the beach. But at this time of year the few tourists spent their money in the steamy tea shops or art galleries rather than brave the outside.

The wind pulled at her as she walked along the coast road, out of the main town, passed scrappy grass with its ‘No Ball Playing’ notices and the pub that still sold ‘Austerity Lunches’. She was heading to her favourite part of Sole Bay – the trashy harbour end, with its caravan park, dodgy prefab houses growing shells and beach paraphernalia in the gardens, and the black rickety sheds advertising fresh fish for sale. Today, the boats were tied up in the harbour, the fishermen not foolhardy enough to brave the North Sea conditions. There would be no boxes of slippery silver fish or snapping crabs until the weather had calmed.

The call from Jonathan Danby had come a few days after she first spoke to him. Days that were spent going to and from Sasha’s, making sure she ate something, even if it was only a bowl of soup. Days of going over and over the whys and the wherefores of Jackie Wood’s release from prison. Alex tried her best to sound soothing and caring, but however much you love someone, however much you care, after a while your patience runs out. She couldn’t risk her sister doing anything else stupid so she just gritted her teeth and carried on caring. Sasha’s house became ever more claustrophobic. The one good thing was that Jez did come up trumps and was spending each evening there, and the occasional night. She managed to avoid him nicely.

So when Danby called, she was ready to do anything, go anywhere.

‘This’ll be a sympathetic look at her life?’

Not this again. She took a deep breath. ‘As I’ve already told you, it’ll be an honest one. That’s how I’ve got my reputation. Whether it’s sympathetic or not is up to her, in a way. I write as I see it.’ She held her breath.

‘Fee?’

‘As we agreed.’

An inhalation and then a sigh. Smoking, Alex reckoned.

‘Look, I’d be lying if I said I was happy about this, I’m not. But Miss Wood seems keen, for some reason. Says she likes your work.’ Sure she does. ‘Will only talk to you. Doesn’t want me there.’ Alex closed her eyes. All above board. Now there was no reason for Liz to get the jitters and say no. This interview could be gold dust.

‘So the answer is yes, but with certain restrictions.’

‘I don’t do restrictions,’ Alex said. Ground rules have to be set from the outset, parameters defined, otherwise you end up dancing to your subject’s tune, and that just doesn’t work. Alex knew she’d done the song and dance thing with Malone, but that was an exception.

She heard the crackle of cellophane; the flick of a lighter, another inhale. ‘Jackie doesn’t want anyone to know where she is.’

‘I understand that.’ The dance continued.

‘You know what this country’s like; there’ll be a lynch mob after her before you can say “not guilty”. The Mail will be writing editorials about the death penalty and all the other red tops will be baying for blood.’

‘Right.’ She balled her fist. But she is guilty, Alex wanted to shout at him down the phone. She was found guilty. She was only let off on a technicality, some obscure legal thing; the expert witness making a fuck-up, being discredited. Alex had believed him, they all had. And she didn’t see any reason to change her mind now.

‘You won’t have to travel far,’ said Danby. ‘She wanted to go somewhere she knew. Figured it would be easier for her.’

‘So…?’

‘She’s in your neck of the woods, as it happens. Suffolk.’

Alex closed her eyes. She was so close. ‘Fine,’ was all she said.

Eventually she and Danby managed to thrash it out. She was to tell no one where she was going, who she was interviewing – apart from her editor, she lied – and for that Jackie Wood was going to grant Alex one or two mornings of her time.

Deal done.

It was half-term and Gus was at home. Alex had been trying to get him to do some schoolwork; to help her with shopping; to get him chatting to Malone: anything to keep him away from trouble. Smelling the drink on his breath had unnerved her, as had his run-in with a reporter. She didn’t want him to be sucked into something else he couldn’t deal with. And she had started paying for his skiing trip, crossing her fingers at the same time.

He was in the sitting room on his Playstation, swatting zombies. Malone was due round in a couple of hours.

‘Gus?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I’m just off out.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Malone’ll be here soon.’

‘What to— gotcha!’ She saw a splat of red on the television screen.

‘Not to babysit you, no. He’s come to see me, but I’m just off to interview someone for the magazine.’

‘Anyone good? Yesss.’ His fist punched the air. ‘More points.’

She hesitated a little too long.

Gus took his eyes off the undead. ‘Mum? You’re looking shifty. C’mon, who is it then?’

Should she lie? Tell a half-truth? What? She sat on the arm of the chair. Tried to ruffle his hair. He jerked his head away. ‘Listen, Gus, it’s Jackie Wood.’

He turned away, his eyes now glued to the screen. More splats of red, more zombies’ heads exploded.

‘Why?’ His voice was flat, his knuckles white where he gripped the games console.

‘I think it could be useful, helpful even.’

‘What are you going to ask her?’

She shrugged. ‘You know, the obvious really.’

He stared at the screen. Even the undead were motionless.

At last he turned and looked at her, blinking slowly, coming out of zombie-land again. ‘You’ve got your coat on.’

‘Yes. Walking, saving petrol.’ Bloody hell, she could have bitten her tongue.

He nodded. ‘So she’s nearby. Come back to the scene of the crime, as it were. How can she do that? How can she come and live here, of all places? Surely there should be some sort of law against it or something? I dunno. Anything?’

‘Gus—’

‘I know, I know, you can’t tell me. Confidentiality and all that. But I don’t reckon you’d make much of a detective.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Didn’t take me long to suss out she’s come crawling back to town.’

Alex attempted a laugh, but it sounded hollow. ‘Please don’t say anything, Gus. Part of my contract is that no one knows where she is.’ And she’d made a right fuck-up of that already.

‘What are you going to ask her?’

She was on firmer ground now. ‘I’ll begin by asking about her time inside, you know, just to get her confidence. Nod sympathetically and all that. Ask about her childhood. How she met Martin Jessop. Draw her out, that’s the plan.’

‘Do you get to ask about, you know?’ He swallowed, his eyes darting around the room. Not for the first time she cursed the fact that her boy had grown up defined by the murder of his cousins. But she believed in telling the truth. What was the point in shielding him when he would find out another way? And probably in a badly thought-out muddled way from his mates.

She gave a small smile. ‘I hope so.’

Gus shuddered. ‘I can’t think of anything worse,’ he said, turning back to his game. ‘She doesn’t deserve to be out, free, does she?’

Boom. Thud. Splat. Zombies started hitting the deck again.

‘She won her freedom, sweetheart.’

‘It was what? – quashed – isn’t that what they say? Doesn’t mean she’s innocent.’

‘That’s the way it works.’

He sighed and turned to look at her. ‘Is this gonna make you even worse?’

‘Even worse? What do you mean?’

‘Come on, Mum. You know what I mean. You don’t let me have a life now. And if there’s some murderer roaming the streets—’

‘It’s only because I care and want to keep you safe. Anyway, the courts say she’s not a murderer.’

‘Mum. I’ve said this before. Harry was killed fifteen years ago. Fifteen, you know? And Millie? Who knows what happened to her, but it happened. A long time ago. It wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t yours.’

Alex closed her eyes and let the guilt invade her body.

‘Mum? Mum? Are you listening to me?’

She opened her eyes. ‘Yes, of course I am.’

‘No, you’re not.’ He turned back to the screen, disgust evident on his face. ‘You never do.’

Alex looked at him. Did she have any idea what her own son was thinking or feeling? She saw more than the beginnings of fluff on his chin and wondered who was going to teach him to shave. Maybe he had already done it, guided by his friends. She ached for him inside and, for the first time, wondered at her wisdom in going it alone after she’d got pregnant. Not that she’d any choice, as the one-night-stand father hadn’t wanted to know. But still.

His hands were busy with the controller. ‘Besides. Me and my mates think they should bring the death penalty back. For murderers of kids. They don’t deserve to live. Do they, Mum?’ Another zombie bit the dust.

What should she say? Teenagers saw things in black and white – there was no grey or in-between in their world. But then, how could she disagree with him when she didn’t? For most of her life she had been vehemently against the death penalty, arguing that it was plain murder by the state, and that the sign of a civilized society was the way it treated criminals. But that was then. Fifteen years ago she changed and believed nothing short of hanging would have been good enough for Martin Jessop and the same for Jackie Wood, even though she was only found guilty of being an accessory. But the pair of them made the family go through a long and tortuous court case, which completely destabilized Sasha. There had been no rest for any of them; every day they had to live with what had happened.

Now she hated her, Jackie Wood, more than him. That woman could have stopped Jessop. She could have not given him an alibi and saved them weeks of misery, of the police hunting for the bodies.

But although Jessop was dead, the guilt was still alive in her. Her house. Her garden. Her fault.

If Jackie Wood had any self-respect, any at all, she would reveal where Millie was buried.

‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Millie?’ Gus’s voice broke into her thoughts.

She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘All the time.’

‘Ask her, Mum, won’t you?’

She nodded, her throat all at once too full to speak.

8

The rain had eased off by the time Alex reached the caravan site at the harbour end, but still she pulled her scarf up around her face. The rain might have stopped, but the wind was still strong enough to make skin sore, especially when combined with the salt from sea spray. The sea looked rough and wild, too, and you couldn’t tell where the greyness of the sky bleached into the greyness of the sea. Plenty of white horses rolled into the shore, only broken up by the groynes that stretched out like witches’ fingers into the water. Seagulls swooped and screeched overhead, and in the distance the smooth, ping-pong dome of the nuclear power station rose like a modernist sculpture.

The caravan site, rather obviously called ‘Harbour’s End’ was, as it said on the tin, at the end of the harbour road and opposite the lifeboat station. At its entrance were the public toilets.

She looked at the piece of paper that had the directions to the caravan on it; the cold air making her shiver. Number forty-four. Down the main bit of road, turn second left, and it was at the end of the row.

The wind moaned in and around the lines of static caravans. She saw the odd person in the distance, tending to the outside of the vans, but generally it was very quiet. A ghost town.

Jackie Wood’s caravan, which was cream and green with a lick of decay, just like the other hundred or so, was opposite the river that ran into the sea, with a good view of the fishermen’s ramshackle huts and the row upon row of fishing boats, some from Lowestoft, some from Aldeburgh, most from Sole Bay. There were net curtains at the windows, and a couple of terracotta pots either side of the door, sporting fronds of grass and dead twigs. Alex stopped, realizing she was shivering not just from the cold, but also because she felt lost, a bit frightened even. What was she expecting Jackie Wood to say? Come on, she told herself, treat this like any other interview.

She thought back to the last time she’d seen Wood, before the court case. She was being interviewed on the News Channel – News 24 as it was then – sitting in her flat, Martin Jessop by her side. Mr Jessop from upstairs. Nice flats they were too; a well done Georgian conversion in a decent part of town. Nobody wanted to rent them after Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop were arrested for murder. They were holiday lets now; completely repainted, redecorated, rehabilitated. There was a campaign to get the whole block demolished and a memorial garden planted. But the Sole Bay Society put their boots in and saved the Georgian building. It didn’t really matter to Alex – Georgian building or memorial garden – it was still where her nephew and niece had been murdered.

When they first went missing, there she was, Jackie Wood, sitting next to him – the murderer – and saying what a tragedy it was. How the community had to pull together, that they were pulling together, and were organizing searches of the town, the beaches, the dunes, the harbour. The local and national media were hungry for interviewees about ‘the situation’, and Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop fitted the willing bill. Wood, the local librarian; Jessop, a lecturer at the college in Ipswich. There was much speculation about their relationship. Again, something else the media wanted to romanticize; document every twist and turn.

If only they had known there was a much better story than that.

If she closed her eyes, Alex could still see her, head cocked slightly to one side, the furrowed forehead, the oh-so-sympathetic expression. He, meanwhile, just looked at his shoes. Then, suddenly, he gazed at the camera and shook his head.

‘They were lovely children,’ he said. ‘So polite. Full of life.’

Past tense.

And she remembered knowing then; knowing absolutely that they were the ones who had taken the twins.

When they were arrested, the feeding frenzy really started.

‘She is in,’ said a voice from behind her, interrupting her memories. ‘She’s always in.’

Alex looked over her shoulder. A woman of about thirty with a cigarette in one hand, mug in the other, was standing in the doorway of the caravan opposite. The dark roots were showing in her hair, and her face had lost the fresh-skin look of youth. Alex wondered what she was doing in a caravan on the Suffolk coast in the middle of winter.

‘I came this way looking for work.’ The woman had read her mind. ‘Thought it might be easier here than in the city.’

She wondered which city she meant. ‘And has it been easier?’ she asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘No, not really. But I have got a few shifts at the Tesco’s on the high street, so I reckon that’s better than nothing.’

Alex nodded. The idea of a new supermarket in the middle of the town had caused a lot of local consternation when planning permission was granted. There were petitions, and placards, and letters to the planning office and the local MP, and God knows who, but it had lumbered forward like a boulder rolling down a hill squashing everything in its path.

‘Anyway,’ the woman went on, ‘give her a knock.’

‘Thanks,’ Alex said.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Sort of.’ She managed to give a rictus smile.

‘She looks familiar.’

‘Really?’

The woman shrugged. ‘Tell her she can come over and have a coffee if she wants. Wouldn’t want her feeling lonely here.’

Alex nodded. ‘Okay.’

The woman shut her door.

Alex swallowed. Her mouth was dry and her heart was thudding. She pressed her fist against her breastbone. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered. The enormity of her actions had just dawned on her. She was about to come face-to-face with the woman who was – whatever some bloody judge said – complicit in the murder of Harry and Millie. And she was supposed to be carrying out an interview with Jackie Wood when all she wanted to do was to shake out the answer to the question that had haunted her family for more than a decade – where was Millie buried?

And why shouldn’t she? There was no need to talk to Jackie Wood for any length of time; she could even ditch the idea of an article. Nothing lost, except more of her dwindling savings. And she would have had the chance to ask her about Millie. On another level, Alex was curious about the woman; about what had made her tick then and what made her tick now. How she could sit and blatantly lie to everybody; the lies she was still continuing to tell now?

Let out on a technicality. That was not innocence.

Squaring her shoulders, she lifted her hand up to knock on the door.

It opened before her hand made contact.

‘I saw you standing outside. Alex.’ Jackie Wood’s voice was pitched a little too high and had the soft Suffolk burr that Alex remembered from the courtroom – both characteristics had been blurred by the television microphones. What was more startling was that the long black hair she had seen on the screen was now cut short and dyed blonde. Jackie Wood was dressed in an off-white fluffy fleece, faded, ill-fitting black jeans, and brown slippers with pom-poms on the toes. She was even more diminished than she had seemed on television and her skin had not yet regained a healthy colour. Alex guessed the woman opposite was telling the truth; Jackie Wood didn’t venture out much.

She was so very ordinary.

Then Alex noticed the scar down one side of her face, the skin puckered, as though it had been sewn up by a child.

Jackie Wood blinked at her. ‘Come in. I’ve been expecting you for ages. Let’s not talk on the doorstep.’ She opened the door a little wider while keeping herself inside the caravan.

For a moment, Alex was outside of her body. One part of her looking at what she was doing and wondering how the hell she could do it, the other part of her relishing the idea of talking to the woman. She wanted to sniff the air, see if she could smell evil.

Not evil, but fustiness. The smell of a tin box that rarely had its windows or doors opened. Stale cigarette smoke, too. Grease, fat; the lingering smell of fast food. The lightness in her head dissolved.

‘Take a seat.’ Jackie Wood waved to a cloth-covered bench to one side of the caravan. The table in front of it was crowded with papers, a plate with a piece of half-chewed toast on it, and an overflowing ashtray. Some sort of convector heater was pumping out warm air. She sat on the bench, sliding round behind the table.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Jackie Wood, whipping away the plate and putting it into the tiny sink. ‘I should have cleared up before you came.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Alex, noticing that she had quite an array of daily newspapers, from The Times to the Daily Star. Again, Jackie Wood saw her looking and began gathering them up into a pile.

‘Something to do, isn’t it?’ she said, nodding towards the papers. ‘I like to see whether there are any stories in them about me. Since I came out. Sometimes, you know, they get the facts about me wrong. One of the papers kept saying I was forty-four years old. I’m not. I’m forty-three. It’s horrible reading really personal things about yourself in newspapers. And it’s even worse when they’re lies. Do you think I should write to the editor?’ She stood still, looking at Alex, blinking slowly. Then she turned away and dumped the papers onto the floor with a thump. ‘Are you warm enough? I’ve taken to wearing these thick fleece things, keeps the wind out.’ She plucked at the material. ‘It’s so bloody cold in this part of the world.’