Every family has its secrets…

Two dead bodies. A lifetime of secrets.

When Rachel Porter’s estranged mother dies, she returns to her family home filled with dread about having to face her past, and the people who populated it.

Little does she know that there are dead bodies waiting to be discovered, and a lifetime of secrets are about to unravel.

Secrets kept by her mother, the liar.

Also by Ann Troup

The Lost Child

The Silent Girls

The Forgotten Room

My Mother, The Liar

Ann Troup

ONE PLACE. MANY STORIES

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Also By

Title Page

Author Bio

Acknowledgements

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Endpages

Copyright

ANN TROUP

Lives by the sea in Devon with her husband and dog. Two children have been known to remember the house, which they call home, but mainly when they are in need of a decent roast dinner, it’s Christmas or when only Mum will do. In a former incarnation she was a psychiatric nurse, an experience that frequently informs her writing and which supplies a never-ending source of inspiration. You can contact Ann on Facebook or at anntroup.wordpress.com

Acknowledgements

As always it’s the readers and reviewers who make it all worthwhile so my thanks go to them first. I won’t name names, the list would be longer than the book and you know who you are.

Gratitude to Charlotte Mursell and Nia Beynon at HQ for some awesome author wrangling and telling me I’m a pleasure to work with and (almost) making me believe it.

Last but not least, to the usual suspects for all the virtual gin and hugs!

Dedication

To Julia, Lesley and Sue — sisters of the less psychotic kind…

Chapter 1

Rachel’s mother had been fond of blanket statements that set others indelibly in their places. Proud of her insights into the characters of others, she had set out her children’s traits like a script. As if they were pickles in jars, all three of her daughters had been permanently labelled and preserved by her assertions. Frances was the clever one, Stella was useless, and Rachel was just downright difficult.

Did all parents like to define their offspring, leaving their children floundering and typecast? Rachel felt imperfectly moulded by her family, an inconvenient, bit-part player in the sometimes drama that had been her life. It had made her bitter.

Now her mother was dead. Valerie was no more and Rachel wasn’t feeling much of anything except antipathy.

She would have known about Valerie’s death weeks before, but she’d quietly ignored the first letter from Frances, knowing that it couldn’t contain good news. The Porters didn’t trade in good news. The slanting, deeply etched handwriting on the envelope had said enough: Frances could ooze anger even when writing a simple address. She’d used green ink, which Rachel was inclined to think had been distilled from her sister’s bile.

It had taken a second letter containing the expected diatribe of accusations and sour grapes to make Rachel finally take notice. She had already missed the funeral. Frances had been brutal and unforgiving about that. Rightly so in Rachel’s mind – missing your own mother’s funeral was pretty shabby in anyone’s book. Even if your mother was Valerie Porter.

She might not have gone back at all if she hadn’t been required to assist with the application for probate. Without that she’d have carried on burying her head in the sand and ignored them all for ever. It was Valerie Porter’s final revenge to force her to go back.

When she was sitting on the train, when it was too late to turn back and take refuge again, she allowed herself to think about the consequences of going back. Of what she’d have to face.

Who she’d have to face.

There were people more dreadful than Frances who populated the past.

While the train took her relentlessly towards ‘home’, she pulled out the second letter and reread Frances’s words.

‘I am patently aware that you still harbour resentment about the past; however, the house is a joint responsibility and whatever grudges you still bear, I feel you should put them aside for once and show a little loyalty,’ Frances’s letter baldly stated. ‘Stella is nowhere to be found and I’ve been left to deal with this alone. You have a legal obligation to carry out Mother’s last wishes at least. I will expect to see you at the soonest opportunity. I shan’t say at your convenience because that would mean waiting for ever

Rachel could imagine the gritted teeth and grim expression that had fuelled those words. It had been a sense of stale guilt and obligation that got her to Paddington Station, plus curiosity and a strange, unpleasant yearning for something she couldn’t define, which had made her get on the train. Since when had Frances ever needed anything from her?

With every mile that took her closer to home she felt an increasing sense of apprehension. Given the circumstance of her departure all those years ago, it was bizarre that Frances would contact her at all, let alone request her help – they both knew that there was no love lost between Valerie and Rachel; they hadn’t spoken in years.

The only logical conclusion she could draw was that her physical presence was needed to allow the sale of the house because no connection between sisters, or mothers for that matter, would have driven Frances to write otherwise. Given that for most of Rachel’s life, Frances hadn’t been able to bear being in the same room as her for more than a few minutes, there couldn’t be any other reason.

Frances wanted the money. Nothing else on earth would have forced her to make contact, not even the truth. That was something none of them could bring themselves to face.

***

By the time Rachel arrived at the house Frances had already sold everything of any remote value that Valerie hadn’t, and had resorted to burning what was left on a large bonfire in the overgrown garden. Things that couldn’t be burned, like the ancient enamelled cooker that their grandmother had bought in 1959, and the six broken vacuum cleaners that had languished in the attic for years along with numerous other aged and dishevelled domestic items, were to be taken to the local tip by Sid, ‘The Man With A Van’ and his monosyllabic sidekick, Steve.

Sid and Steve were cheap, available and discreet. Frances valued discretion and economy above most things – including false sentiment. She showed none of that when greeting her sister, merely offered her a pair of rubber gloves and a black bag and told her to pick a room, any room, and get on with it.

Rachel received a warmer welcome from Sid.

The amiable Sid explained that he and Steve had been at the house for days, repeatedly loading the van and making trips to the local landfill site as Frances steadily forced the large old house to disgorge its contents and bare its mouldering soul.

Rachel arrived with barely enough time to salvage Stella’s meagre belongings from the purge, and only just managed to stop Steve feeding yet another box of books onto Frances’s pyre. They were Stella’s books, children’s classics that Stella had kept from her own childhood and had read to Rachel during hers.

Frances argued that if Stella had wanted the books she would have taken them with her; Rachel shrugged and said that she was keeping them anyway. One of the rare pleasures of her childhood had been listening to Stella read those stories, so even if Stella didn’t want them, she did. Besides, monstrous though Frances could be, what kind of person could burn books?

Frances had been so eager to clear the house that she hadn’t really left much that Rachel could do, except stand by and wonder at her sister’s vigorous enthusiasm for incinerating every last stick the house had ever contained. It felt as if she were only there to witness the destruction. It was Frances’s way of punishing her, she supposed.

‘I’ve spent too many years being oppressed by all this junk!’ Frances yelled above the crackling bonfire, eyes blazing as bright as the fire as she watched the flames consume yet another chunk of their past. ‘It’s liberating, don’t you think?’

Sid, standing next to Rachel, shook his head and said, ‘I dunno, seems a shame really – could have got a few quid for some of that stuff on eBay. Sacrilege,’ he added, bemused. He looked back at the house. ‘Must really have been something in its day. They don’t build them like that any more.’

Rachel followed his gaze and looked back at the mock Tudor sprawl she’d once known as home. ‘Probably,’ she said, her voice dull. Not that she could ever remember it being anything other than dark, damp, cold and gloomy. By the time she’d been born, The Limes was already suffering from serious neglect. Valerie had been too mean to heat the rooms they didn’t use and mildew had taken hold, running riot over the walls. The negligence had been an open invitation for rot and decay to come on in and have a ball. Even in winter it had sometimes been warmer outside than in – a childhood full of blue noses, chilblains and chipping the ice from the taps had left its mark on Rachel. She still couldn’t bear the cold.

The house had eight bedrooms. In Rachel’s memory only four had ever been regularly used. Of the four bathrooms, they had all shared one, and out of the study, drawing room, morning room and reception room, they had only ever used the morning room as it was close to the kitchen and easier to heat. The attics and cellars had been no-go zones for so long that she had almost forgotten they existed other than as repositories for the things Valerie had been too lazy to throw away.

As far as Rachel was concerned, The Limes was a mausoleum that housed a bitter past. If it had ever had a heyday it was so far back in the mists of time she would have to squint to imagine it.

Much in the way that she needed to squint at Frances through the billowing smoke. She was prodding the fire with the end of a garden hoe, her eyes glinting and flickering with reflected flames, making her look like a reject from the legions of hell. The fire had brought out a demonic glee that made Rachel instinctively shudder despite the heat that rolled across the neglected lawn.

‘Right, that’s going nicely,’ Frances called. ‘Stephen, you come with me and we’ll tackle the outbuildings and, Sidney, you can go with Rachel and make sure there’s nothing of value left inside.’

A brief flicker of panic crossed Steve’s face as he looked at Sid. Sid had quietly confided to Rachel that both men had fallen foul of Frances’s imperious temper over the past few days and it was considered the short straw if one of them had to work alongside her. ‘Come on, chop chop!’ she shouted, clapping her hands as if Steve was a refractory Pekingese.

Rachel watched them go. ‘I suppose we’d better follow orders,’ she said to Sid, preparing herself to go back into the near-naked house.

Free of its clutter, the house was even more cavernous than she remembered, all its strident objections to old age and infirmity amplified by the lack of furnishings. With nothing to soak up the sound and attract the eye, it looked bare and ashamed of itself. Rachel almost felt sorry for it. Nobody loved it, and she couldn’t remember anybody ever having been happy there. As a home its heart had been hollowed out by acrimony and now it was being finished off by arch indifference.

She and Sid ascended the stairs, the bare treads creaking in protest now that they had been stripped of carpet. They checked the bedrooms, finding them damp and empty, until they entered Valerie’s room.

Their mother’s room had always been sacrosanct, an oasis of calm and solitude that Valerie had often retreated to – usually complaining of a headache and clutching a medicinal bottle of sherry. Rachel couldn’t recall ever having been allowed inside, and it surprised her that she’d never thought it strange before that moment.

Now only a few black sacks stood against the wall ready for Sid’s next run to the tip. This first and final ingress into her mother’s secret chamber – the room that had been the inner sanctum, the room that had been the container of Valerie’s personal misery – was a frank disappointment for Rachel.

As a child, she had often spied by squinting through the keyhole like a woebegone urchin, imagining that beyond the locked door lay another realm. The wardrobe in the corner might have been the entrance to another dimension, where Valerie existed differently and found the peace she had so often demanded before shutting the door against the needs of her family. Although, in Rachel’s imagination the White Witch had always had much more of a resemblance to Valerie than had been entirely comfortable. Stella’s books had stirred some lonely and uncomfortable memories.

Though Valerie’s presence still echoed in the hollow room, Rachel could not for the life of her imagine what peace of mind her mother had ever found from lying on the bed staring drunkenly at the blowsy roses scrambling across the wallpaper beneath the dust and cobwebs. Those keyhole-shaped memories had suggested something exotically different from the chilly, mildewed reality she now faced.

The only piece of furniture not yet consigned to the tip, or dispatched to be consumed by the flames of Frances’s blaze, was the wardrobe.

Rachel walked over to it and touched its mirrored door, which opened with an ominous creak. She gave it a wry smile, unsurprised that it wasn’t filled with fur coats and melting snow after all.

‘She said I could have that,’ Sid said, apparently afraid that Rachel might condemn it to the fire. ‘I was saving it for when we finished. That way I can put it on the van and take it straight home.’

The faintest aroma of mothballs belched out as she shut the door. ‘I’ll lock it so it’ll be easier to move. You should hang on to the key. They’re always better when they still have their keys.’ The door was a little warped, and she had to shove it hard to make it fit properly, promptly dislodging the prized key in the process. ‘Bugger!’ she said. The key had bounced on the bare floorboards and hidden itself underneath the wardrobe. On hands and knees, Rachel peered into the murky spider graveyard that lay beneath. ‘I can’t see it. We’ll have to pull the bloody thing out.’

Sid obliged, and together they coaxed it into a reluctant slide across the wooden boards. As Rachel bent to retrieve the key, something prodded at the edges of her awareness. ‘I didn’t know that was there,’ she murmured, standing up and looking at a door that had been hidden from view.

‘Built-in cupboard,’ Sid pronounced knowledgably. ‘What d’you need a wardrobe for if there’s a built-in cupboard?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘More junk for you to get rid of I expect,’ she said, prising open the cupboard door and cringing as the hinges squealed in protest.

The cupboard was surprisingly empty given the rubbish that had always cluttered the rest of the house. A faint flurry of fetid air wafted into their faces as they peered into its dark recesses. On the lone shelf, there stood a biscuit tin and on the floor stood a metal box. Rachel took down the biscuit tin and levered off the lid. Various bits of paper and old photographs nestled there – mostly showing Frances as a young child. The papers proved to be old school reports, all describing Frances’s attributes in glowing terms.

Rachel couldn’t recall Valerie keeping a record of either her or Stella’s school records – though Frances probably would have burnt them if she had. As Rachel rifled through, it occurred to her that she had never seen a photograph of herself as a child anywhere in the house. Probably because there weren’t any to see.

Under the photographs was a small red book: the type that had a tiny lock. She took it and the photographs and stuffed them into her back pocket. Maybe Frances would want them, maybe not. The rest she put back in the tin and threw the whole thing into one of the black sacks that flanked the room.

Sid grabbed the metal box. ‘Bloody hell, this is heavy. Hey, perhaps we’ve found the family jewels!’ he quipped.

Rachel responded with a sardonic smile. The box was little bigger than a bread bin but looked like it weighed a ton. Sid placed it at Rachel’s feet, grunting with the effort.

‘Want to do the honours?’ he asked.

She shook her head, watching as Sid attempted to release the lid. Though the metal had been galvanised, some substance had affected it, causing rust to scab the edges and eat into the structure. Sid took out a Swiss Army knife and used the screwdriver bit as a lever, giving a satisfied grunt as the orange crust gave way. He lifted the lid, revealing the contents. ‘It’s full of sand,’ he said, puzzled.

‘Sand?’

‘Hang on, there’s something poking out of it.’ He tugged, dislodging a torrent of dry, gritty matter as the object shifted.

It was some kind of parcel, wrapped in dirty cloth. Sid unwound the material, causing more sand and grit to fall and litter the floor as each layer of fabric came away and disintegrated in his hands.

‘What is it?’ Rachel asked, peering over his shoulder at what appeared to be some type of shrivelled, leathery doll.

Sid didn’t speak. His skin had turned a ghastly shade of grey and all Rachel could see as she peered at his stricken face was his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fishing float as he fought for the words to describe the thing that was now lying on the floor.

***

Frances’s scream was so piercing it rattled the glass in the rotten window frames, buffeting Rachel’s eardrums and snapping Sid out of his shocked stupor as effectively as if it had taken tangible form and slapped him in the face.

Once the sound receded, everything became horribly quiet as if there had been a sudden solar eclipse and the birds had stopped singing in deference to the dark. Time became elastic as seconds extended themselves into blurry, suspended pockets of disbelieving minutes.

Sid’s mobile phone began to ring, the tinny, incongruent tones of ‘My Way’ shattering the silence and stirring him into action. When he finally answered the thing after fumbling for it in every pocket, Rachel could hear Steve’s high-pitched voice. With escalating panic, he told Sid about the scene outside. Rachel doubted that Steve had ever uttered so many words in one hit before. Which was probably why he sounded confused.

She could have sworn she heard him say that they’d found a dead body in the shed.

Chapter 2

Rachel didn’t know who to deal with first: the paramedics who had arrived by speeding up the drive, sirens blaring, or the police who were wandering around shouting things into their radios and telling everyone what to do.

Sid still didn’t look a good colour and was being tended to by a pretty detective constable, who had given him a blanket and a cup of tea. Steve wasn’t faring much better. He was standing in the middle of the melee staring at his bloodstained hands like a confused Lady Macbeth. Frances was out cold and was being loaded into the back of an ambulance and all Rachel felt able to do was watch the barely credible scene unfold.

Steve was trying to explain that Frances had taken one look at the contents of the trunk in the shed, had staggered backwards, tripped over a black bag, fallen backwards, and bashed her head with a sickening thud on the edge of the door. Only when he’d dragged her out and put her in the recovery position had he realised that the blood on his hands was coming from a patch of her exposed skull. He had finally lost the plot when he had spotted a piece of hairy scalp dangling neatly from the latch of the shed door. At that point, he had regurgitated his lunch all over Frances’s cashmere sweater.

Incongruously, all Rachel could think of was that it was a good thing Frances had been unconscious at the time; she could be a bit obsessive about things like that.

Apparently spotting Rachel’s bemused demeanour, the DC left Sid and gently led her into the kitchen. ‘You’ve had a bit of a shock, love. Let’s get you a cup of tea,’ she said, her voice soft as she took Rachel’s trembling hand. Rachel never drank tea, but accepted a cup anyway, and sat there in the tired kitchen staring into the tea’s murky depths as if scrying for an improved view of her world.

***

The last time DC Angie Watson had set foot in a house like this had been ten years before when her history teacher had dragged a group of them around some National Trust pile. Angie had found the whole thing so stultifying that she couldn’t even remember the name of the place now, but she did remember that it had been a lot like this, only bigger and much, much cleaner.

The only nod towards the twentieth century in The Limes was the kettle she had used to make the tea. Everything else in the room was straight out of a museum. Angie’s taste in kitchens and furniture leaned more towards IKEA than Antiques Roadshow and she looked around the room with barely disguised distaste. No wonder these people always appeared to have money – by the looks of it they never bloody spent any.

She had recently taken out a ten grand bank loan and had used every penny of it to have a new kitchen put in, and if the look of this one was anything to go by, it would be money well spent. There was no way that she would ever stand at an old stone sink doing the washing up and dumping it on a wooden draining board, not when some genius had invented the dishwasher.

Finished with critiquing the kitchen, she turned her attention to the woman at the table, who was trying to read her own tea leaves without realising she had to drink the stuff first. Other than giving her name as Rachel Porter and her date of birth, she hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived and had just stood there, staring at everyone as if she was a bit vacant.

When they’d got the call Angie hadn’t expected to find herself babysitting a spaced-out, scruffy forty-year-old woman who didn’t know what to do with a cup of tea other than stare at it. It was hardly the cutting edge of crime fighting and for her first foray as a fully-fledged DC she found herself frankly disappointed. This case had all the flavour of Murder, She Wrote rather than Criminal Minds. Not quite what Angie had had in mind when she’d joined the team.

God, she hoped she didn’t end up looking like Rachel Porter by the time she was forty: no make-up, shapeless clothes, and hair that hadn’t seen the good edge of a pair of scissors for God knows how long. It was a nice colour though – brown, the shade of conkers. Those split ends needed to go, she thought, absently running a hand through her own straightened and highlighted hair. She might get the shit jobs, but at least she could look smart while she did them.

Rachel was skinny, as if she hadn’t had a decent meal in years, which always made women look haggard and drawn in Angie’s opinion. This observation made her feel better about her own propensity to gain weight by merely thinking about food. It might at least save her from looking a wreck in years to come. Christ, that was a shallow thought – she was on a case and thinking about the size of her arse in comparison to another woman’s. She straightened up and tried to look professional.

She supposed that she ought to try to get Rachel talking, but considering that Ratcliffe would be in here any minute, there didn’t seem a lot of point. Might as well leave it to the boss to sort out. It was hardly as if she was going to crack the case in five minutes flat. Besides, looking at the state of Rachel Porter, the only thing she looked like she was capable of murdering was a good meal.

As if on cue, DS Ratcliffe strode into the kitchen and sat down on a kitchen chair. Angie pretended not to notice his blush as the chair groaned under his weight. He was well built, her boss. He smiled at Rachel and introduced himself. ‘Miss Porter, I’m Detective Sergeant Mike Ratcliffe. Would you like a fresh one of those?’ He looked hopefully at Angie whilst nodding towards the kettle.

Rachel shook her head. ‘It’s gone cold.’

‘I know. Would you like another?’ To his obvious disappointment, she shook her head again. He sighed as Angie set the kettle down and shot him a smug look. ‘Your sister should be fine. We’ve contacted her husband and he’ll meet her at the hospital. I’m sorry you weren’t able to go with her, but we do need you to answer some questions.’

Rachel nodded at him then turned her gaze back to her tea. If Angie didn’t know better, she’d have sworn the woman was stoned.

‘Do you know how we can contact your other sister, Stella?’

Rachel shrugged. ‘She’s gone. She should be here; Stella’s always been here.’

‘When was the last time you saw her?’

‘October nineteenth 1996.’

‘That’s both very precise and a very long time ago. I’m told that your mother recently died. Did you see your sister at the funeral?’

‘No, I haven’t seen either of them since ’96. I didn’t go to the funeral.’

‘Why not?’

Rachel showed surprise at the boldness of his question. ‘We had a row; I was excommunicated from the family. It happens. I don’t even know what I’m doing here now to be honest. I should have stuck to my guns and stayed away.’

‘Why are you here now?’ Ratcliffe asked. Angie thought it odd and a little mercenary to ignore the funeral but turn up to pick over the family bones. It was more than obvious they’d been clearing the house. Maybe this would turn out to be more interesting than she’d first thought.

‘Frances asked me to help sort out the house. I wanted to see it again, see if it was as awful as I remembered.’ She paused and looked around. ‘It is.’

Angie had to agree with that. The house was oppressive and gloomy, not exactly a place anyone would want to call home.

Ratcliffe wanted to know why they had all fallen out.

‘Money. Always money isn’t it? My aunt died – she left me her flat and some money. My mother and Frances thought I should share and share alike. I didn’t want to, so we fell out.’

Her answer had been too trite, too neat for Angie’s liking. She hoped her boss would pursue it. ‘What about Stella? What did she think?’ Ratcliffe asked.

‘I can’t recall her being given the chance to say what she thought,’ Rachel replied. ‘Does any of this have anything to do with the fact that dead bodies seem to be popping up all over the place?’

Ratcliffe leaned back in the chair. Angie heard it moan again as the weak joints adjusted to the shift in weight. She could see him thinking and wondered if he shared her thoughts. Her guess would be that Rachel had been a kid when someone had murdered an adult and a baby, covered them in sand, and hidden them away. Still, that didn’t quite explain Rachel’s flippant and detached response to the situation. ‘Yes, about that,’ Ratcliffe said, tapping the table with the tips of his fingers. ‘The bodies. Do you know who they are?’

Rachel wasn’t looking too good; her face was ashen and a slick of sweat was making her forehead shine like oiled alabaster. Angie watched with mounting concern as the frail woman put her head in her hands and said, ‘I don’t know,’ in a voice that was almost slurring. It looked as if she was physically trying to swallow down the distress and confusion of what was happening. Angie had never seen someone turn so grey so quickly. Without warning, Rachel’s eyes rolled back and she slid off the chair onto the floor where she began to jerk and twitch like a thing possessed.

No one had been expecting that.

‘Get Ferris in here now!’ Ratcliffe yelled. A sound that sent Angie scurrying for the door.

Angie knew Julia Ferris as a woman more accustomed to dealing with dead bodies than live ones at that stage of her medical career, but she was still a doctor and immediately recognised that Rachel was having an epileptic seizure.

‘She’s having a seizure,’ she said with her usual cool detachment. ‘Given that she’s wearing a MedicAlert bracelet, I suspect she suffers from epilepsy.’

‘Aren’t you going to do anything?’ Angie asked, worried that they’d be sued for negligence if Rachel was injured. They already had one damaged Porter sister on their hands.

‘Other than move that chair so she doesn’t smash her face on it, no. She’ll be out of it in a minute or two. Just let her settle and give her some water. She’ll probably be a bit sleepy too, so let her rest if she needs to. You can check with her whether she carries medication and has taken any today. Now, does anybody mind if I get back to the dead guys now?’ Ferris said peevishly. Angie knew she would have to get garbed up in another paper suit to go back to the crime scenes, and she’d have been pissed off too in Ferris’s shoes.

Angie was a little shocked by the doctor’s nonchalance but Ratcliffe just appeared relieved that Rachel wasn’t having a stroke or a heart attack. So far, they had two dead bodies, one witness in hospital, a potential suspect (who was fuck knows where), and a second witness who was writhing on the floor like a demented snake.

Just as Angie’s anxiety was beginning to rise again, the rigors torturing Rachel’s thin body started to lessen and slowly she stopped jerking and grew progressively limp. ‘Get her some water will you?’ Ratcliffe asked as he bent down to help Rachel sit up. ‘You had me worried for a minute or two,’ he said, helping her into a sitting position. Angie watched as Rachel fought to compose herself, shame spreading across her features in the same way that urine had spread across her trousers during the fit. Angie couldn’t help but feel for the woman.

Rachel took the water and drank it down quickly. ‘Sorry, that one seemed to come out of nowhere,’ she said. ‘Haven’t had a fit in ages.’

‘Are you OK? Do you need anything? Can I get your medication?’ Angie asked, her heart rate only just beginning to settle back to its normal pace after the drama. She passed Rachel the blanket that had slipped off when she fell, hoping to at least help her preserve some dignity in front of Ratcliffe. She might have encouraged the poor woman to go and change, but the house was practically empty and it was clear there weren’t any clean clothes lying around. Angie watched as Rachel wrapped the blanket around herself.

‘More water please – took my dose this morning,’ she said, still looking disorientated. Having drunk the second glass straight down, she explained that she suffered from epilepsy and had since she was a child. Though usually well controlled, the fits could be brought on by stress. ‘I think you would agree that my day has been stressful,’ she said to them both with a feeble laugh.

‘Just a bit. Look, if you need to take a break we can pick this up later,’ Ratcliffe said, genuine concern showing on his face.

‘No, I’m fine. I’ll be fine,’ she insisted. ‘I want to get this over with as soon as possible and get back to my room please.’

Ratcliffe looked as doubtful about that as Angie felt, but decided to press on. He helped Rachel back onto the chair and motioned to Angie to put the kettle on. ‘When your sister saw what was in the trunk in the shed, she called out before she fell. The young man out there said that she called out the name “Roy”. Does that mean anything to you?’

Kettle in hand, Angie watched as Rachel blinked at him for a moment whilst she absorbed his words.

‘Roy? Roy was Stella’s husband. Are you saying that’s him in the shed?’ she asked, screwing her eyes up in an attitude of dazed disbelief. ‘Roy walked out on Stella thirty years ago, just upped and left, said he was going out to buy cigarettes and never came back. It can’t be him.’ She screwed her face up in what might be disbelief. With the state of her it was hard to tell. ‘I’m sorry, but I think I’m having another one,’ she mumbled before she went down again.

***

It was no good. By the time Rachel came out of the second fit, she was so exhausted they would have been hard pressed to get her name out of her in any sensible form. The only reasonable thing they could do was get someone to drive her to the hotel she was staying at and call it a day.

The only useful information they’d gained from the whole interview was gleaned from Rachel’s parting words as she walked wearily out of the door. ‘By the way, if the body in the shed has a gold tooth, a canine, then it is Roy.’

***

Julia Ferris was in the yard discussing the logistics of moving the trunk complete with sand and body with the Crime Scene guys when Ratcliffe and Angie approached her. ‘Does our victim have a gold tooth?’ he asked.

‘Yeah, a canine – why?’

‘’Cos I think I know who he is, and given that his wife is missing, I think I can make a conservative guess at who killed him. The deceased may well be one Roy Baxter, husband of the eldest Porter girl.’

‘Stella,’ Angie added for clarity.

Ferris frowned. ‘Doesn’t mean she killed him, if it is him, which I admit is likely but we don’t actually know yet. What about the baby? Any ideas?’

‘Not a clue, yet. Anyway, what’s with the sand? I don’t get it.’

Ferris stripped off the latex gloves she had been wearing and wiped a powdery hand across her forehead. ‘Whoever did this to them attempted a rudimentary form of mummification by the looks of it. It’s sharp sand, the kind builders use, so it contains salt. Salt absorbs the moisture that bodies release as they decompose. It’s also a good preservative. Whoever did this didn’t do a bad job – the bodies are in pretty good nick.’

Angie suppressed a shudder. ‘But why mummify them? Why not just dig a hole and bury them?’

Ferris shrugged. ‘Could be anything: keeping them as trophies à la serial killer maybe, or couldn’t be bothered to dig the hole. Let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to tip sand in a box than it is to dig a grave deep enough to bury a body without risking being seen – or the body being dug up by a curious dog or an overenthusiastic gardener. Dunno – you tell me? There’s one thing: mummified bodies don’t smell so bad. It’s why they don’t decay. They don’t attract flies and bugs and so don’t betray their presence so easily.’

Ratcliffe nodded thoughtfully. ‘Gruesome though, implies a lot of thought. How long do you think they’ve been there?’

‘I’m not sure, but a fair few years. When did your Baxter guy disappear?’

‘Quite a long time ago, we think,’ Angie said. Hopefully the sisters would help them pinpoint the exact time period, and she and Ratcliffe might be able to corroborate it by finding other witnesses. Unfortunately, what the sisters hadn’t helped with was the preservation of the crime scene and potential evidence. Anything that might have offered clues to what had happened had more than likely been burned or was now languishing somewhere on ten acres of landfill site.

The clearance guy, Sid, had been more than happy to tell them of Frances’s enthusiasm in disposing of her family’s belongings. Information that told Angie that Frances wasn’t going to be an easy woman to deal with.

So far, all they had managed to salvage were a few boxes of Stella’s possessions, some kids’ books, an old and seriously ugly wardrobe, and some bags of rubbish. With so little to go on, Angie suspected they weren’t going to find out anything worth knowing any time soon.

Chapter 3

At half past four in the afternoon when Rachel finally reached her hotel room, she could barely keep her eyes open and flopped, fully dressed, onto the bed. The next time she looked at the clock it was ten past eight. It wasn’t until she opened the heavy curtains that she realised she was looking out of the window onto the beginnings of a bright new day rather than on the quiet twilight she had been expecting.

There were two things she liked most about hotels: the anonymity that was afforded by them and the oodles of hot water that allowed a bath to be drawn in minutes. In the rare moments when she felt as though she might like to rejoin humanity, she would just book a room for the night and pretend she was a tourist. On a whim, she’d walk into a random hotel in London, get a room, and spend the time there watching TV, ordering room service, and having baths. For a night or two she could make believe that she wasn’t lonely, that she had purpose, that she had a life.

It wasn’t that Lila’s flat didn’t have a bath – it did, a huge, deep, claw-footed cast-iron thing that emptied the tank at five inches and chilled the water within seconds. Maintaining personal hygiene at the flat was a puritanical experience, akin to self-flagellation with cold water and rough towels. Having the option of a proper soak in hot water was more than a small pleasure. With this in her mind she opened the taps in the beautifully modern bathroom, perched herself on the edge of her rented bath, and watched the steam rise with comforting anticipation.

The epileptic fits of the day before had been an unpleasant surprise; it had been a long time since she’d had to face the humiliation of having a seizure in public, even longer since she’d experienced one so bad that she’d wet herself. The medication she took daily had kept them in check for years, and if she had one at all, it was when her defences were down and she allowed dark thoughts to run riot. More often than not, the fits were transient partial seizures, which to anyone else would look like daydreaming or drunkenness. A full-blown fit was so rare she could remember the exact day the last one had happened, but she didn’t want to think about it.

Dwelling on that period of her life was something she actively avoided, doing anything she could to distract herself. Coming back had brought some things way too close for comfort already, but questioning herself about why she had come in the first place was pointless. It didn’t matter; she was where she was. What did matter was how soon she could get away.

Soaking in the bath, she chose not to think about anything other than coffee and food. Fits made her hungry, and she needed caffeine before the headache that had begun to niggle at her turned into a full-blown howler. She bathed quickly and only half dried her hair before she dressed and went out of the door in search of breakfast.

As she wandered up Westgate Street, towards the cathedral and to the only café she could remember, she thought of Stella and wondered where she had gone, and why. Perhaps Frances had finally managed to drive her out. As an accomplished escape artist herself, Rachel didn’t question why her sister had disappeared. Anyone who had known their family would have been able to answer that.

However, she was utterly puzzled as to where Stella might have gone. To the best of Rachel’s knowledge, Stella had spent the last nineteen years looking after Valerie. She didn’t have friends or a social life, or a bolthole like the flat. She was hardly the type to reinvent herself in the way that Frances had. Besides, she was the quiet type – timid, nervy, and not the sort of person who could disappear easily. She was probably avoiding Frances, a motivation that Rachel could entirely understand.

Once inside Café Milano, she immediately experienced a rush of nostalgia. The place had hardly changed since the days when she and Stella had lingered over their milkshake and coffee, pretending for an hour or so that they didn’t have to go home. She took a breath, filling her lungs with the scent of vanilla and fresh-ground beans, smiling as she recalled that she had discovered Italian coffee in this place, long before the big chains had flooded the world with their skinny lattes and pretentious chai.

There was a seat at the back, half hidden behind a bamboo screen, a perfect place to people-watch without being seen herself. She ordered coffee and a bacon roll, then sat back and looked around at the other customers, soaking in the normality of them and hoping it would rub off a little. Then she saw him, a tall man striding across the room. The way he moved was painfully, heart-stoppingly familiar and the recognition sent a cold shard of fear slicing through her gut. He was heading straight for her and her only escape was the bad wiring in her brain and the way it could opt out of trouble whenever it saw fit.

***

He was sure this time. He had caught glimpses before, the turn of a head, or the sound of laughter so painfully familiar that it induced a sensation of time grinding to a standstill. His heart flip-flopped and fluttered pointlessly like a moth battering at a light bulb. So many times over the years he’d found that it wasn’t her after all. Just some woman who thought he was a weirdo freak.

Now he was holding up the queue at the cashpoint as he stared at the café door, one hundred per cent sure that Rachel had just walked through it.

‘You asking to be mugged?’ a woman said aggressively, pushing in front of him so that she could get to the machine.

Charlie had been so rapt by the realisation that Rachel was back that he’d forgotten that he was standing in the middle of town with a hundred pounds in crisp twenties just sitting in his hand, looking ripe for the picking.

‘Arsehole!’ the woman hissed as he moved away, hastily pushing the money into his pocket ready to launch himself across the road.

He got as far as the café door before chickening out and turning towards the newsagent’s instead. If he were going to go in and confront her, he needed to gather his thoughts. He would buy a paper, something to hide behind when he pretended that his being there was just an accident.

A lot was at stake. If he had any sense he would walk away and make himself believe that he hadn’t seen her at all. He would pretend it was the same as all the other times he’d felt a faint glimmer of hope, only to see it fade and die as soon as he’d called her name and been given an odd look by a complete stranger. As his mother would say, only one good thing had ever come from dealing with the Porter family and that was Amy. Everything else that touched them always turned to shit.

However, he’d been waiting a long time for this moment, and he was going to have his say now.

The woman in the shop wanted to chat and he just wasn’t in the mood.

‘Comes to something doesn’t it?’ she said with a cynical shake of her head.

Charlie hated random statements. ‘Pardon?’

‘In the paper. Bodies. Here, right on our doorstep and the woman who did it has gone missing. Not that they’re saying that, but it’s obvious isn’t it? If she’s done a runner, she must have done it. Doesn’t bear thinking about,’ she said, shuddering as she handed him his change.

He didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but accepted his change with a tolerant smile and glanced down at the paper. His eyes were immediately drawn to the left-hand column on the front page. The names stood out like two nuns in a brothel. Porter and Baxter. He scanned the article, and exhaled slowly.

No wonder she was back.

***

Rachel knew that he had come in looking for her. His movements were too purposeful for this to be a coincidence. She ought to have known that this would happen, but had stupidly hoped that she could avoid it. If the police hadn’t insisted that she stick around she would have been back in London by now, instead of sitting around and wondering why fate was such a relentless bastard.

Of course Charlie had aged; they both had. She just looked old, but on him greying hair and lines around the eyes had enhanced the air of artless charm he’d always been blessed with. She watched helplessly as he ploughed an inexorable path through the crowded café towards her table.

Had there been a back door, she would have bolted, but she was trapped. Stomach pitching and rolling, she could do nothing but wait for the moment she had been dreading for nineteen years.

He had spotted her easily; she was only half-hidden behind the bamboo screen and he was moving towards he like a guided missile. Pushing past the other customers, he made his way to her table and slapped a newspaper down in front of her. ‘I didn’t think anything would bring you back, until I read this. It’s been a long time, Rachel,’ he said, his voice rank with bitterness.

She forced herself to look down at the paper, the sea of words blurring underneath the stark headline – Two Dead in Local House of Horror.

Until that point she had almost convinced herself that the events of the previous day had been a surreal nightmare, the kind that lurked and clung long after waking. The kind that left an unpleasant taint that was impossible to ignore. Every word of the headline sent a slug of reality into her brain. Each time a blurred sentence unravelled itself and landed in her grey matter, her senses began to fizz and pop like a damp firework, until the whole thing short-circuited and she felt herself going down.

***

The whole café held its breath as Rachel hit the floor. Even the hiss of the coffee machine halted for a second or two. As she’d fallen she’d taken the tablecloth with her, dragging everything with it and sending a mesmerising cascade of sugar skittering across the floor like a million microscopic diamonds, which were swiftly crushed under Charlie’s feet as he rushed to move furniture out of the way. Someone shrieked as Rachel’s body began to twitch and jerk, and almost everyone panicked as Charlie dropped to the floor and started to yank at Rachel’s neck in an attempt to loosen her scarf.

‘Oh my God!’ the waitress yelled, trying to pull him off.

Charlie shouted, and shrugged her off. ‘Get off me, you silly cow, and move the bloody tables out of the way. She’s having a fit!’ All his old, familiar instincts had kicked in as soon as he’d seen the warning in Rachel’s eyes before they had glazed over and rolled back into her head like a couple of milk-white marbles.

Adrenaline surged through his body as he struggled to loosen her scarf while trying to ignore the chattering voyeurs. The waitress was twittering on about calling an ambulance, but he told her no, even though she shrieked again as blood began to dribble from Rachel’s contorted mouth. ‘She’s bitten herself – it’s nothing. She’ll be fine in a minute. Just give her some space will you, and tell those bloody people to stop gawping,’ he shouted.

‘Are you a doctor then?’ the terrified girl asked, only to have her question completely ignored.

Rachel’s body began to relax and Charlie found himself trembling with relief. He hadn’t had to deal with one of her seizures in a long, long time. He sat back, stretched out his legs, and pulled her limp, exhausted body into his lap, propping her head against his chest, and stroking the damp hair away from her pallid face. He wasn’t sure which one of them was more traumatised. ‘Can you get her some water please?’ he asked the shocked waitress.

The girl nodded and scurried off, briefly pausing to turn and ask, ‘Still or sparkling?’

Charlie rolled his eyes. ‘Tap,’ he said impatiently.

The girl returned with the water and the proprietor of the café in her wake, a sensible-looking woman who offered to pull the screen across and give them some privacy. Charlie accepted gratefully and took the water, holding it to Rachel’s mouth and making her drink though she was still disorientated.

The café woman ushered the waitress away. ‘Can I do anything? Should I check her bag, call a relative or something?’

Charlie shook his head. ‘No thanks, it’s fine. I’ll look after her.’

The café woman frowned, looking unsure of him. ‘Not being funny, but do you actually know her?’ she asked, shifting her posture to demonstrate that she wasn’t to be trifled with if he turned out to be some random weirdo.

Charlie closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. He supposed it did look somewhat strange. ‘You could say that I do.’

The woman peered at him, suspicion rippling across her face. ‘Are you a relative?’

He looked down at the pale, thin woman who lay against his chest giving everyone the perfect impression of a limp rag. To this day he still didn’t understand how they’d come to this. All those years and here she was, still able to hurt him with a single look.

‘I’m her husband,’ he said.

Chapter 4

When the doorbell rang, Delia Jones peered through the net curtains and smiled with grim satisfaction at the predictability of the police. Since reading the morning paper she’d been waiting for them to call with as much patience as a woman like her could muster. Which wasn’t much at all.

On opening the door she smiled at them both, listened as they introduced themselves, and perused their warrant cards with unnecessary scrutiny. When she felt she’d annoyed them enough, she adopted an air of weary disinclination and said, ‘I suppose you had better come in.’

***

Ratcliffe followed Angie into Delia’s cluttered sitting room and formed his first impressions while Delia lowered herself into a very fat armchair and took her time settling in. The whole room was stuffed to the gills with cheap china and whimsical little ornaments. It was the kind of room that could send a grown man slowly and steadily crazy over time. He looked at her smirking from her fat chair. Delia Jones struck him as the kind of woman who probably knew that and coveted her collection even more for that reason.

‘I know why you’re here – I read the paper. But if you’re looking for my son, he doesn’t live here any more. Besides, whatever you lot think he’s no killer, and Roy Baxter was alive and well long after he was locked up, so you’ll be barking up the wrong tree anyway,’ Delia said, offering the statement with smug satisfaction.

So, she’d read the papers. Sometimes Ratcliffe hated reporters; they were way too quick off the mark with their speculation. He hadn’t even had confirmation that the body was Roy Baxter yet, but the paper had got hold of the name and run the story anyway. ‘There is nothing that we are aware of that would link your son to this case, Mrs Jones, but we will need to talk to him at some point. It’s you we’ve come to see,’ he said.

The team had run some checks back at the station and had been surprised to find that there had been another body found at The Limes thirty years before. That one had been fresh though, not preserved in sand. Her body was still seeping blood when she was found complete with her killer, knife in hand, standing over her body.

The victim was Patsy Jones, daughter-in-law of Delia. The case notes stated that Patsy had been having an affair with Roy Baxter, an error in judgement that had led to her death. The murder had been committed by Delia’s son, who had been found next to his dead wife holding the murder weapon. A kitchen knife, which he’d used to stab Patsy four times after he had bashed her over the head with a blunt object that had never been found or identified. It had been an open and shut case. Delia’s son had served ten years of a possible fifteen and hadn’t come to the attention of the police since.

Delia was correct in saying that her son couldn’t have had anything to do with at least one of the bodies found the day before because he had been on remand when Roy Baxter had gone missing. For Ratcliffe there was no obvious link between the two cases other than The Limes appearing to be a popular venue for untimely and horrific deaths, but they did need to talk to Delia Jones – she had been the Porters’ cleaning woman thirty years before and was likely to be one person who knew more about them than anyone else.

Uniform had completed some preliminary door-to-door enquiries, and from the little information they had gathered, Angie and Ratcliffe had concluded that the Porter family were not neighbourly types. Of those people interviewed who were aware of their existence, most described them as eccentric, standoffish and weird.

The only real contact any of the neighbours had with them was on the odd occasion when someone had plucked up enough courage to complain about the run-down state of the house and the untamed jungle that may have at one time been a garden. All had been given short shrift and had not tried again. Consequently, the only person who might have any useful information on the family regarding the time that Roy Baxter had been a part of it was Delia Jones. An ornery old bird who was busy giving both he and Angie some seriously dirty looks.

Scowling at him she said, ‘What do you want to talk to me for? I didn’t bloody kill him, though if I had Charlie wouldn’t have had to pay for something he didn’t do. If you ask me, Roy Baxter got everything he deserved.’

Angie stepped in, going for the ‘woman’s touch’, Ratcliffe guessed. It wouldn’t work – nothing did with Delia’s type.

‘How did you and your son know Mr Baxter?’ she asked.

‘I would have thought you already knew that. I was their cleaner and Charlie worked for Roy. He was a builder; he gave Charlie work, and only did it to piss Valerie off. She wasn’t keen on Charlie.’

‘Why not?’ Ratcliffe asked.

Delia laughed and shook her head. ‘Valerie Porter didn’t like anyone much.’

Ratcliffe didn’t buy it. He looked at Angie and by his guess, neither did she. ‘What do you mean?’

Delia shifted in her seat. ‘She was a bitter woman, a dried-up old stick who liked to make other people miserable when she could. She was always the same, even when she was a kid: a nasty, spiteful bitch who thought she was a cut above everyone else. Put it this way, it takes more than a posh house and a good name to shift a reputation like hers.’

‘She must have liked you – she gave you a job,’ Angie said.

‘Huh! She gave me the job because I was the only person stupid enough to do it for the lousy money she paid. Liking didn’t come in to it. Besides, she enjoyed the fact that someone she knew worked for her, made her feel important,’ Delia said bitterly, obviously still suffering the indignity of her lot.

‘Why stay if she was so unpleasant, paid so little?’ Angie wanted to know.

Delia looked her up and down, obviously taking in the smart suit and the air of self-assurance.

‘I don’t suppose a woman like you would know what it’s like to be left on your own to bring up a kid. I left school at fourteen, got married when I was seventeen, had Charlie when I was twenty, and was widowed at twenty-two. I had no money, and a roof to pay for. Wasn’t quite so easy to go to the social, cap in hand, then. I had to work and I had to go somewhere I could take Charlie with me. Needs must, Constable.’

She paused and pointed a fat finger at Angie. ‘You should be glad the world has changed. If it hadn’t you wouldn’t be sitting there in your nice suit calling the shots. You would have been chained to the sink with a load of snotty-nosed kids around your ankles too, just like all the other women I knew back then, so don’t judge me, lady. I wasn’t too proud to earn my own living even if it was cleaning up someone else’s muck. At least I wasn’t raking through it like you lot do!’

Angie was taken aback by the level of venom in Delia’s tone, but Ratcliffe was unfazed by the attack. He liked to think of himself as thick-skinned, like a suit-wearing rhino – give her time and Angie would be the same. She had potential. He wouldn’t have given her the time of day if she didn’t. He’d spent his career hearing bullshit from the likes of Delia Jones and he could take it. He had a decent brain on him. Wasn’t exactly a people person but got the job done through determination and stoic patience.

Ignoring Delia’s defensiveness, he ploughed in. ‘You may have read that there was a second body found, a baby. Can you tell us anything about that?’ he said, not looking at Delia but studying her crowded mantelpiece instead. A photograph had caught his attention. A pretty, dark-eyed girl smiled out at him from the confines of a cheap silver frame. She looked familiar.

Delia saw where his gaze fell. ‘Well, you’re not going to get an answer by looking up there, are you? Sit down for God’s sake. You take up too much space,’ she said irritably, watching with grim amusement as he perched his big frame on the edge of another fat chair. ‘I don’t know anything about a baby, but I wouldn’t put anything past that family. They liked their secrets,’ she added enigmatically.

‘What secrets?’ Angie wanted to know.

‘Well if I knew that, they wouldn’t be secrets would they?’ Delia countered with a satisfied smile. ‘Look, I walked out of there the day Patsy died, and I never looked back. I don’t know anything about what you found there and I’ve had no contact with any of them since. I can’t help you.’

Ratcliffe glanced back up at the photo. ‘What about Rachel? Did you have contact with her?’

Delia shrugged. ‘For a while. Couldn’t help her family could she? Anyway, I haven’t seen her for getting on for twenty years. She moved away, cut herself off. Didn’t even go to the funeral.’

‘Did you go to the funeral?’ Angie asked.

Delia pursed her lips. ‘I did. Wanted to make sure the old cow really was dead.’

Ignoring this comment, Ratcliffe pressed on, ‘Why didn’t Rachel go? It was her mother after all.’

Delia looked away from him. Her eyes flicked rapidly from side to side before she answered, ‘They fell out. Don’t ask me why because I don’t know, but I think it was over money. Valerie’s sister-in-law died; left the lot to Rachel, which was when she buggered off to London. Rachel lives in Lila’s old flat now as far as I know. Look, they were a weird lot. Stella wouldn’t say boo to a goose, Frances was so far up her own backside she thought her shit didn’t stink, and Valerie wasn’t much better. She made Maggie Thatcher look like a pussycat. I just worked there. A long time ago.’

Ratcliffe sighed. This was going nowhere. ‘Is there anyone else you can think of who might have known the family?’

Delia shrugged again. ‘Not likely – they weren’t exactly the kind that had friends. And before you ask, no, I don’t know where Stella is.’

***

Ratcliffe had called it quits. They were getting nowhere fast with Delia Jones but they both knew that she was holding back. He could see her now, staring at them through her net curtains as they climbed into the car. Angie rammed the key into the ignition and said, ‘Well, she was like a breath of rotten air eh? What now, boss?’

He gazed out of the windscreen, looking at nothing in particular, while she waited for him to answer. She had fast-tracked through the force on a degree programme that meant quick promotion and instant status, but if he was honest, she was a bit out of her depth sometimes, especially around blokes like him. Older male coppers intimidated her. The only way she had learnt to deal with it was to refine a cool, detached persona that she hoped others saw as enigmatic and intelligent and pepper it with the odd bit of edgy humour.

The truth was, she was confused and often struggled to find a way forward, especially in cases like these. Everything she had learned in college flew out of the window when she was faced with someone like Delia Jones. The theory was there, she knew what she was supposed to achieve, but she just hadn’t developed the knack of engaging reluctant witnesses.

Ratcliffe just plugged away at them like an unstoppable force – he just didn’t go away until they gave in. ‘We’ll talk to Charlie Jones, then go back and see his mummy – until one of them gives us what they know. But first we go to the hospital and visit Frances.’

Chapter 5

The first thing Rachel saw when she woke was Charlie sitting on a chair, feet up on the dressing table watching the TV with the sound off. She didn’t say anything at first, just watched him and tried to accommodate her shame and confusion. The aftermath of a fit was always the same: severe exhaustion and a strange sensation of derealisation. She couldn’t remember much of what had happened – other than she had been in a café and Charlie had walked in.

Slowly she realised that she was back in her hotel room, in bed, stripped down to just her bra, pants, and T-shirt. Charlie must have found her key, brought her back and undressed her. The thought made her wince with more shame, and the wincing made her hurt. Her mouth was sore as hell and she could taste the slight tang of blood where she had bitten her cheek during the fit.

‘Feeling better?’ Charlie asked.

Rachel hadn’t noticed that he was looking at her. ‘Thirsty,’ she croaked.

Charlie pointed to a glass of water standing ready on the bedside table and watched her as she took a long gulp. ‘How’s your mouth?’

It was raw, causing her to wince again. ‘Painful,’ she said flopping back against the pillows, unable to make her mind grasp the surreal situation. She felt like a damp sock. ‘Why are you here?’

Charlie didn’t say anything. Instead, he took the glass and walked into the bathroom to refill it.

By the time he came back into the bedroom, Rachel had gathered herself together and realised that she’d been pretty rude to the man who’d helped her. Though she could argue that he’d triggered the fit by turning up out of the blue and scaring her shitless. But then she’d turned up on him out of the blue too.

‘Thanks for helping me, but you didn’t need to stay,’ she said.

Charlie didn’t speak, just sat back in the chair regarding her with an inscrutable look on his face.

Rachel was at a loss; it was as if she’d been placed under a microscope and had been found to be vulnerable and stupid. She’d never been able to stand pointed silences and fought to fill the gap. ‘How are you?’ she asked, immediately feeling idiotic.

Charlie gave a wry laugh and glanced heavenward before turning his gaze back to her and stating coolly, ‘Old, tired, bitter. Some things don’t change, Rachel.’

‘I’m sorry,’ was all she could say, directing the apology towards the room. It would have been impossible to look him in the eye and say it.

Charlie was silent for a moment. ‘That was a bad fit.’

Rachel watched as he stood and turned towards the window to stare out onto the street below. Anything other than have to show his face to her, even though the ice had been shattered rather than broken. ‘They’re not usually that bad, not these days. But you know how it is, they’re stress-related. What with everything that happened yesterday and then seeing you, well …’ She trailed off.

He’d turned back to face her. His jaw was twitching, the way it did when he was angry, tense and upset. It had always unnerved her.

‘So Roy got killed and stuffed in a box in the shed. What about the other one, Rachel? Has your family found an even more effective way of disposing of their unwanted children? Rather than just abandon them without a word, kill them off and hide the bodies? Gruesome but efficient I must say,’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

Rachel had been bracing herself for this from the minute she saw him walk through the café door. She had spent nearly half her life avoiding this moment because there was no way – no possible way – that she could tell him the truth of why she’d left him.

She was saved from making any kind of response by the sound of a single, loud rap on the door.

***

Ratcliffe had drawn a blank with Frances. The bang on the head had turned out to be worse than expected and she was still in hospital. She had been placed into a medically induced coma while the doctors waited for the haematoma that was pressing on her brain to subside. They had no clear idea of when she would regain consciousness so Ratcliffe had decided to question Rachel again during the wait.

His boss, DI Benton, had conveniently extracted herself from the case leaving him, Angie, and a few others to rake over the ashes of this bizarre and soulless case. No one knew anything, and if they did, they weren’t talking. His instinct told him there were hidden agendas, evidenced by the fact that no one cared about the two desiccated bodies that had given him some distinctly disturbing dreams the previous night. No matter how many years’ policing he had under his belt, there were some things it was impossible to un-see. The tiny, wizened body of the baby would haunt him for ever.

Despite Frances’s predicament, he had managed to speak to her husband, Peter Haines, a supercilious man in Ratcliffe’s opinion. He had been far more concerned with the fact that his good name would be brought into question by the case than he had been about either his injured wife or the fact that two bodies had turned up at her former home. Ratcliffe had instinctively disliked the man and looked forward to dragging him into the station to make his statement in due course. In the meantime, some gaps needed filling in.

He hadn’t bargained that Rachel would have company so he was completely wrong-footed when a man opened the door. So much so that it took him a moment or two to realise that Rachel’s visitor was none other than Charlie Jones.

‘Well well well,’ he said, pulling out his warrant card and pushing it under Charlie’s nose. As if Charlie didn’t know exactly who he was already. ‘It’s not often we get to kill two birds with one stone.’

The fact that Rachel Porter was sitting up in bed half-dressed and Jones was looking decidedly shifty told him that whatever had been happening in that room wasn’t something that they would want to share. For some strange reason, the sight of her like that, dishevelled, half-naked, irked him more than it should.

‘I don’t believe in coincidences, Mr Jones. Perhaps you’d like to tell me why you’re here?’

Charlie patiently explained that he had bumped into Rachel that morning, that she had had another fit and that he’d helped her get back to the hotel. It was as simple as that.

Ratcliffe wasn’t buying it.

He glanced at Rachel, sitting up in bed, her eyes wide as if she was auditioning for the part of Bambi. ‘Really? As simple as that? I didn’t have you down as the Good Samaritan type, Mr Jones,’ he said, his gaze settling once again on the woman in the bed. The fact that Rachel’s mouth was swollen bothered him, but he wasn’t there to talk about that. ‘We’ve been to see your sister, Rachel. She’s not well, not at all.’

If he’d expected a torrent of concern to flow from Rachel’s mouth he would have been disappointed. Her reaction was to ask what was wrong, nod her head, and reassure him that Frances would no doubt survive the ordeal. ‘Frances is tough,’ Rachel said sagely.

What was it with these people?

Ratcliffe leaned on the edge of the dressing table opposite the bed, forcing Rachel to edge away from him and pull the covers up to her chin. ‘Rachel, I need to ask you some questions about Stella, but as you’re currently … indisposed, perhaps you’d like me to give you a few minutes to get dressed?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind,’ she said with a blush and a look that encompassed Charlie too. Ratcliffe hadn’t forgotten him; he was just biding his time to see what would come out of this bizarre situation.

Both men stepped outside the room and Ratcliffe heard the lock on the door click into place in their wake. Rachel was taking no chances and he couldn’t blame her.

‘I should go,’ Charlie said, discomfort rolling off him in waves judging by the way his jaw was twitching and the fact that he was clenching and unclenching his hands. Ratcliffe was curious – it came across as a big reaction for a Good Samaritan.

‘Might as well stay. I’d like to talk to you too – so no reason we can’t kill two birds with one stone, for now …’

Charlie stared at him, tension locking his features into a mask of what looked like impatience. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

Ratcliffe put his hand up in a gesture of peace. ‘It’s just a chat, nothing formal. Not yet. I wouldn’t be here on my own if that was the case.’

His words didn’t do anything to alter the other man’s demeanour.

Ratcliffe heard the lock click back. Rachel was dressed and standing pensive, but with the door wide open.

***

‘Tell me about Stella – what’s she like?’

Rachel looked from Ratcliffe to Charlie, taking her time in constructing a suitable answer. ‘Stella is quiet, nondescript and timid really. She cared for my mother after her stroke, which wasn’t an easy task. The fact that she’s gone surprises me. She loved The Limes. I didn’t think she would ever leave. I don’t know what to tell you really. She might have changed. I’m not sure I would know her at all any more.’

‘You said “my mother” – that’s an odd thing to say. What do you mean?’ The distinction in her words had sprung out at him.

Rachel sighed. ‘Stella is my half-sister. She’s Valerie, my mother’s, stepchild. Stella’s mother died when she was young. Our father married Mother when Stella was twelve. She had Frances already and I came later. The Limes was her birth mother’s family home, so Stella always had more of a connection to it than the rest of us I suppose. I think she felt it was more hers than ours. Our father inherited it when his first wife died and Mother got it after he went.’

‘So Frances is a half-sister too?’ Ratcliffe asked. Rachel nodded, her face tense. He guessed that Frances might be a sore subject. ‘What happened to your father?’

‘I never knew him. He died when I was a baby. We didn’t talk about him. Mother wouldn’t and Stella wasn’t allowed to. The past was always the past with Mother.’

Ratcliffe turned to Charlie. ‘Do you remember him?’

‘Before my time – never knew him. My mum mentioned him from time to time. She didn’t think much of him.’

Having met Delia Jones, Ratcliffe wasn’t surprised at this. Other than her own son, Delia didn’t seem to have a high opinion of anyone. He turned back to Rachel. ‘Have you managed to remember anything about where Stella might have gone – friends or relatives she may have decided to visit?’ he asked.

Rachel shook her head. ‘There are no relatives, and no friends. Stella is a shy person so she never had friends. Our mother didn’t encourage friends. But I’ve not seen them for a long time – maybe that changed.’

Despite his questions Ratcliffe knew more about the family than he was choosing to let on. Angie had done some homework on them. ‘What about the shop? Didn’t Stella work in the family business? Might she have met people there?’ The Porters had owned a haberdashery, closed for years now, but Stella had worked there.

‘I really don’t know. I think the shop closed when our mother got ill. I haven’t seen them for so long, I don’t know. I’m sorry but I’m really not much help.’

He turned to Charlie. ‘What about you, Mr Jones? You knew her – where do you think she might have gone?’

Charlie shrugged. ‘Don’t ask me. I haven’t set eyes on her for thirty years. Neither did I want to. Sorry, Rach, but you know it’s true.’ Ratcliffe knew it was true too. The last time Charlie Jones had clapped eyes on Stella Baxter was the day she had given evidence against him in court.

He sighed. Why the hell did none of these people know anything? ‘Rachel, do you have a photograph of her?’

Rachel laughed as if surprised by the request. ‘No. We didn’t do photos, unless Frances has one. There are pictures of her wedding, I think.’

Ratcliffe nodded. Typical. ‘OK. Now can you tell us anything about the body that you found yesterday, the child?’

It was the first time that Rachel had shown any real emotion in front of him. Her eyes began to fill with tears as she shook her head. ‘I don’t know, I really don’t. I didn’t even know that there was a cupboard there until yesterday. Oh my God, I can’t believe that someone would do that to a baby!’ she said, her voice trembling.

Ratcliffe noticed Charlie’s body stiffen at Rachel’s words. ‘People are capable of some terrible things,’ he said, looking straight at Charlie.

Charlie looked away.

He asked a few more generic questions and got no further forward. Whatever these two were hiding, he wasn’t going to get it out of them in the casual confines of a hotel room. Sooner or later he’d have to call them both in for a formal interview, put them under a bit more pressure. For now they’d at least given him a few hints as to which direction those formal interviews would take. In Ratcliffe’s mind nothing was ever wasted.

As he drove back to the station he figured that there was no alternative but to get a picture of Stella and give it to the press as soon as possible. Someone would have seen her recently. All they had to do was pick her up when that someone came forward, and they would – they always did. Whatever had gone on in that house over the years, Stella was the one who would know; Ratcliffe was convinced of it.

Strangely, it still bugged him that Charlie had been in Rachel’s room. The air between them had been crackling with tension when he had walked in and whatever their agenda was, it was surely loaded with something more than curiousity.

It hadn’t taken him long to work out that there was more between Charlie Jones and Rachel Porter than met the eye – Charlie’s links to the Porter house went further than his past criminal record. The fact that his mother owned a photograph of a girl who was the spit of Rachel had sparked Ratcliffe’s instincts and he’d been more than a little smug when the team had turned up a marriage certificate and a birth certificate.

Maybe Rachel and Charlie assumed that he already knew that they were married, but neither of them had volunteered it and there had been no mention of their child. Though Jones had balked when Rachel got upset about the dead baby. If Rachel was telling the truth about having left years before and having no contact, she had left her kid too.

She came across as a nice woman – shy, worried, but nice. Could a woman who’d left her own child be called nice? It depended on the circumstances he supposed, but Charlie Jones had been convicted of murder and quite frankly Ratcliffe wouldn’t have left Delia Jones in charge of his dog. To leave a baby with those two would be a determinedly odd thing to choose. Rachel Porter needled him. She wasn’t what she appeared to be and there was far more to that situation than met the eye. And he was going to find out what it was.

***

Back in the incident room, he picked up a message to call Ferris. News was in on the bodies. All he wanted at that point was a decent cuppa and time to think, not a visit to the morgue.

Why couldn’t these forensic people just send a report? He never had understood the necessity of having to be shown the gruesome evidence in all its glory laid out on a slab. What was he supposed to do with the mental images? Chat about them to his wife over dinner? Although it might make an interesting change to Maria Ratcliffe’s usual moaning. Not that he could blame her for getting hacked off. She was a good woman who’d had to put up with a lot from him over the years.

Ferris had completed a basic exam on both victims. Her initial conclusions were that Baxter, whose identity she had confirmed by discovering his wallet still intact inside his rotting clothes, had still been alive when he was placed in the trunk. She showed the detective the feeble scratch marks that scarred the underside of the lid.

‘I don’t think he was alive for long, and I don’t think he had much strength left when he made these marks. There is some considerable damage to the skull; I suspect that he was hit repeatedly with something heavy and hard. He would have died from a combination of those injuries and suffocation. There was a substantial amount of sand in his throat. Now that he is out of the sand, and out of an airtight box, he’s going to deteriorate rapidly so I needed to find out as much as I could as soon as I could. I also found something clutched in his hand.’ She held up a bag containing a small gold earring, shaped like a teardrop. ‘My guess is that it belongs to whoever killed him.’

Ratcliffe took the bag and examined the earring. It wasn’t an uncommon design, nothing special at all. Still, if someone could identify it as belonging to Stella, it might strengthen his thoughts on the case. ‘What about the baby? Anything there?’

Ferris sighed. Hardened as they both were to the nature of their jobs, kids were always a tough call on everyone. ‘I think he was dead before he was put in the box. It looks like he was stillborn. To be honest it’s difficult to tell. From the skeleton, the size of the skull, and the length of the long bones, it looks like he had congenital problems. We did manage to salvage this though.’ She passed him another bag containing several thin strips of material. ‘It was what he was dressed in.’

Through the clear plastic Ratcliffe could see a name embroidered on the fabric. ‘Daniel,’ he said aloud. ‘At least the poor little thing had a name.’

‘Anyway, I still have tests to do, and should be getting more results in soon. I’ll let you know as soon as anything comes in,’ Ferris said, bristling. As if she was far too busy to indulge in such mawkish sentiments.

***

Ratcliffe was relieved to be outside and breathing air that didn’t have the rancid aftertaste of decay. No matter how scrupulously clean Ferris’s staff tried to be in there, the whole place still stank of death as far as he was concerned.

He was puzzled by the assertion that Baxter had been alive when he had been stashed in the trunk. From what they did know about Stella, she was a tiny little thing. Baxter had been six foot tall so how had such a small woman managed to manhandle someone that size into a great big trunk? His only conclusion was that she must have had help, which meant that someone else had known that the body was there. His money was on the mother, the dead and therefore perpetually silent Valerie.

They had to find Stella, which meant he had a very good excuse to pay Frances’s husband, Peter Haines, another visit.

Chapter 6

In Rachel’s room, the atmosphere was thick with negativity. Waves of tension were washing across the room, fixing them both into the moment and forcing an uneasy silence. DS Ratcliffe had only just left, but his questions glowed neon bright in Charlie’s mind as if displayed on an imaginary autocue. ‘How well did you know Stella?’; ‘What kind of person is she?’; ‘Did she ever discuss her relationship with her husband with you?’

Stella’s evidence against him in his trial for Patsy’s murder had ensured his conviction. He had spent ten years in prison because of Stella, the woman who had sworn on the Bible to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but. As if anyone living in The Limes even knew what the truth was.

Yes, she had walked into the hallway that day and had been open-mouthed with horror to see him kneeling next to Patsy’s body. Though she had only seen what she wanted to see – she had assumed that because he held a knife in his hand, he was responsible. Charlie was a lot of things, but he’d never been a killer.

In his mind’s eye, he could see the wounds even now, great, savage rents spewing out torrents of blood. If he closed his eyes, it was still there, red pools of it, blossoming on the tiles like a sea of overblown poppies. Blood and more blood soaking into his clothes, clinging to the knife, puddling around his knees. The acrid, metallic tang of it still haunting his nose.

Only one person had witnessed the truth of what happened that day. A ten-year-old kid who had epilepsy. A child who couldn’t be believed. A child who, according to her mother, was a fantasist and a drama queen. The child of a woman who had despised Charlie for years.

Valerie had described Rachel as a problem child to the police, a problem child with an inappropriate crush on an older man. Valerie had blamed herself of course, telling them that it was her fault that Rachel followed Charlie around like a lap dog. As a witness, she had told the jury she hadn’t realised it was a problem until Rachel was prepared to bend the truth for him and cover up his crime. To think that it had gone so far that her child was prepared to lie for him!

Valerie had turned out an Oscar-winning performance as she’d told the twelve good citizens that she saw Rachel’s weaknesses as an indictment of her own poor parenting. She had testified that Charlie was a devious and charming man, and she had no doubt he had coerced Rachel into falsely defending him.

All Rachel had told them was that Charlie had pulled the knife out, not stuck it in, and that he had found Patsy there, in the hall, after she had been stabbed. The police had said that she would, wouldn’t she? The child was terrified of Charlie Jones, so of course she would lie. The jury had shaken their heads at the picture Valerie had painted for them and had looked at her with a mixture of pity and disdain.

Perhaps, that was where it all really began for Charlie. That single moment when he’d realised that the only person in the world who truly trusted him had been Rachel, a geeky ten-year-old kid.

***

Now the adult Rachel watched Charlie warily; that muscle in his jaw was tensing. A bad sign that meant he was in a place where no one else was invited. It was difficult for Rachel to remember a time when she hadn’t felt some form of love for him. An image of Charlie’s smile was one of her oldest memories. Charlie had never brushed her off, never told her to go away, never told her to be quiet and stop pestering. Back then he been like a big brother, fourteen years her senior and awe-inspiringly estimable in her eyes.

When Delia was working in the house Charlie could often be found in the garden, hacking at the undergrowth in a vain attempt to abate its creeping bid for dominance. Then in later years, when he had begun working for Roy and had started to bring the lascivious Patsy with him to The Limes, he had always, without fail, spared time to say something nice to Rachel. What a pitiful little kid she must have been, so grateful for such meagre crumbs and hero-worshipping the cleaner’s boy because he had been kind.

Frances had been the one with the real crush, but Charlie either hadn’t seen the looks she gave him, or hadn’t noticed the efforts she made. Frances had even tried to emulate Patsy, by plastering on make-up and cutting off her skirts, until Valerie had slapped her face and called her a slut. She had backed off then, and had treated Charlie with condescending contempt ever since. His conviction for the murder Rachel knew he hadn’t committed had made Valerie’s day.

Rachel had been the first one into the hall the day Patsy died. She had raced away from Stella, running up the drive and into the house, panting for breath, cheeks rosy from the chill winter air. The hall had been strangely silent, as if time was holding its breath as she had hung her scarf and coat on the hallstand. Only when she had turned towards the kitchen had her mouth sagged open and her feet turned to lead. Patsy had been lying on the floor in a crumpled, bloody heap. A blood-streaked bubble of spit popping on her lipstick-slicked mouth as the life ebbed out of her.

Rachel had been transfixed, rooted to the spot. When Charlie had strolled into the hall from the kitchen, immediately issuing a guttural, almost primeval cry at the sight of his broken wife, he had thrown himself down onto the floor, instinctively pulling the knife from her chest, staring in horror as a pool of blood crept silently, still warm, towards his knees.

Though she could picture it vividly, Rachel couldn’t remember how many minutes the old grandfather clock had marked before Stella walked through the door and something other than death had begun to happen. It had felt like an aeon.

Charlie maintained that he had walked into the back of the house having come from the park, using the small gate that gave the residents of The Limes private access. However, there were no witnesses. The prosecution postulated that Charlie could have been in the house for any amount of time. No one else was in, so no one could corroborate his story. No one except Rachel, but her evidence was inadmissible and at best purely circumstantial. Ten-year-old children were not reliable witnesses.

Rachel knew Charlie hadn’t stabbed Patsy. She had heard that cry. It echoed in her memory like the sound of nails being dragged slowly down a blackboard – a screeching, penetrating sound that made every fibre of her being sing with pain. Most of all it was the memory of the hollow devastation in his eyes that assured her of his innocence both then and now.

If she told him now, told him the true reason she had walked away from him and Amy, she would see that look again. Not just the shadow of it reflected back at her when she looked into his eyes, but a full-blown re-creation of the moment his world had fallen apart for the first time.

Patsy. The woman who had brought them together, and the woman who still stood between them.

Patsy had been a magical creature, the only person Rachel remembered in colour. On the rare occasions she allowed herself to look back at her childhood, everyone else either appeared in black and white, or materialised as a faded, jaded representation of their younger selves.

The Seventies had been like that: dull, and leached of colour. But Patsy had been vibrant and alive, like a bird of paradise among a flock of lesser creatures. When Patsy was in a room she’d had the effect of magnifying everyone else’s mundanity. Stella had become smaller and dowdier; Valerie became more pinched and bitter and even more like an indignant bird of prey than had been usual. Frances’s arrogance became whiningly petulant and Roy had puffed himself up like the peacock he pretended to be.

Rachel had felt even more insignificant in Patsy’s presence, like a drab cuckoo chick in a borrowed nest. Only Charlie hadn’t changed. Charlie never changed.

Rachel’s thoughts were still consumed with the memory of Patsy lying on the hall floor like road kill when Charlie finally broke the silence. ‘So here we are, pulled together again by your damned family. Like always eh? And you haven’t even asked me about your daughter. Remember her? Amy – in case you’ve forgotten. For what it’s worth she thinks you’re dead. I never had the heart to put her straight and tell her she wasn’t wanted and you walked away towards the money. Her life’s been hard enough without having to know her mother is a bitch. I guess you’re just like the rest of them.’

She tried to speak, but the prickling had started in her head again, making her brain feel like an over-shaken Coke.

‘Oh that’s it, have another fit – opt out again why don’t you? It’s what you do best.’

The venom in his words was pulsing through her like liquid fire – she deserved every ounce of it. She would take it and take it again rather than tell him the truth. He was hurt enough. ‘I’m sorry, can’t help it, so sorry,’ she mumbled, already slurring.

***

When the seizure had abated, and Rachel lay once again in a deep sleep, Charlie rifled through her bag, found her medication, and saw that the day’s dose had been taken. He looked in her purse and found a card with the name and contact number of her neurologist, and made the call. All the while feeling like an utter bastard for losing it with her.

Mr Parnell, consultant neurologist and Rachel’s doctor for the past nineteen years, was deeply concerned that her epilepsy had intensified so dramatically. He needed to see her – soon. Could Charlie bring her back to London as soon as possible?

Charlie didn’t have a choice; there wasn’t anyone else who could take her and he hardly had a solid reputation for dealing with wifely welfare. Besides, everyone was better off if she went back to London – especially Amy. Of all the things that Rachel had brought back with her – memories, regrets, hurt, confusion – the threat to Amy was the worst of them. If she found out that her mother was alive she would never forgive him, or her grandmother.

Christ – he’d spent years taking her to a bloody graveyard once a year to put flowers on some complete stranger’s grave just to maintain the lie that Rachel had died. Thank God for common names. He should never have allowed the lie to stand, but his mother had convinced him it was for the best. He’d been so angry and so hurt by Rachel leaving he’d gone along with it, like an idiot, like a sad and stupid man.

He looked down at the sleeping woman, unsure of how he felt now – guilty mostly. He had bullied her and caused the fit. But angry too, still angry, still confused, still hurt.

Chapter 7

By the time Rachel woke up, groggy and hung over from the overactive neurotransmissions that were determined to destabilize her brain, Charlie had packed her bag, paid her bill, and was waiting – keys in hand – to drive her back to London. She couldn’t have looked more relieved if she’d tried. He was relieved too, but her eagerness to leave stung a little. Damn his bloody head! His thoughts were making no sense.

The drive to London was silent and strained. Charlie didn’t say much and Rachel spent the journey with her head resting against the window, eyes closed against the overhead lights that blurred and streaked across the evening sky as they sped past.

Charlie let her rest, figuring it was better just to keep his thoughts to himself. He didn’t want to trigger off another fit, not in the van, and she’d made it clear she wasn’t willing to talk about the past. He had debated phoning his mother to tell her he wasn’t going to be calling round that night, but two things stopped him. If Delia knew he was with Rachel she would probably blow a gasket and the last thing he wanted to have to deal with was his mother having a stroke on top of everything else. Besides, at fifty-two years of age it was hardly necessary to call his mother and check in.

The second reason was Amy. He just couldn’t contemplate having to explain why he’d been such a shit dad and lied to her for her whole life. He’d stayed out before. It needn’t be a big deal if he just played it cool.

He glanced at Rachel, and tried to work out what on earth he was feeling. Any other man would have just walked away and disappeared, but not him. What kind of mug was he? He must be some kind of masochist, going back for more. She was the woman who had just about broken him, but she was also the woman who had given him the most precious thing he had – their daughter. Amy was all grown up and looking far too much like Rachel than was good for his mental health, and still believing that her daddy was her hero. Her daddy felt like a coward and knew he was a liar.

Not that anyone had ever stated Rachel’s supposed death as a fact; it had been something Amy had assumed. There was a vague memory of her asking Delia about it. Amy would have been about five, had just started school, and she had asked outright if her mummy was dead. Some snotty-nosed kid in her class had said that if she didn’t have a mum it must be because her mum had died.

Delia had heard these innocent words and had looked at him, raising her eyebrows as if that unknown kid had presented them with the perfect solution. Then she had soberly lied and told Amy that, yes, her mummy was dead.

Charlie had never had the guts to disabuse her of the notion. His mother had been right; it had been an easy solution at the time. Even though he’d had to search the county’s cemetery records to find a grave with the same bloody name when Amy had asked at age ten if she could take flowers for her mother. It had been excruciating, standing by the grave of some other R. Jones and watching his little girl put flowers there and tell her mummy what had happened at school that week. He’d felt like the worst scumbag on earth.

That was the trouble with lies: they always came back and bit you in the arse eventually.

He knew for a fact that over the years Amy had excused his lack of meaningful relationships, his need for solitude, and his moody silences as chronic grief. That was Amy; she could always take something dark and weave it into a bright shiny ideal just by deciding it was the way things should be. Charlie wished he found it so easy to put such a spin on life. The romantic fantasy that Amy had manifested had satisfied her enough that she hadn’t pressed Charlie for details about Rachel; she didn’t want to cause him pain. That was his girl.

If only she knew, he thought, his face contorting into a wry grimace. Charlie had never had the guts to shatter Amy’s illusions about him. An act of cowardice that he was only just beginning to realise had been a big, no, a huge mistake.

There had been other women over the years; he wasn’t a monk. He had never taken any of them home – didn’t want Amy to meet them, and didn’t want them involved with her. So, all he had managed was to establish few brief liaisons that had fizzled out quicker than a damp match. He could honestly say that overall it didn’t bother him. It wasn’t as if his track record with women would stand up to much scrutiny. Something of the kiss of death had followed him where partners were concerned.

Not that Rachel was dead, far from it, though there had been times over the years that he’d wished she were. How much simpler it would have been to just grieve her loss in the same way he had grieved for Patsy, but from behind the bars of a different kind of prison.

Then again, his relationship with Patsy had been much simpler. She had been another one, a woman who couldn’t take him as he was, but at least Patsy hadn’t felt the need to save him from himself like most women did. Why did they always have a desire to save him, when the only thing he’d ever needed saving from was them? Patsy had wanted many things, money mostly. It had taken her death for him to realise that she’d never wanted him at all.

Rachel was the only one who had ever accepted him unchanged, or so he’d thought at the time. That was why hers had been the biggest betrayal of them all. He almost laughed aloud, stopping himself before he disturbed Rachel.

Any chance that anyone had of saving him was so far in the past they’d need a TARDIS to get to it. Perhaps what those women had always said would prove to be true after all. He would die a lonely old man.

If Amy ever found out about Rachel, he was certain of it.

***

Rachel pretended to sleep, trying desperately to relax so that she would look more convincing to Charlie.

Anything to avoid having to talk to him.

All she wanted to do was to get back to the flat, Lila’s flat. Then she could shut the past out again and go back to the half-life where she had hidden safely for years. An impossible feat now that the biggest part of her past was sitting right next to her, about to invade the only sanctuary she had. What would he make of her existence? Maybe he would be shocked to see the way she lived, just a wistful ghost haunting another woman’s life.

Nothing in the flat had been changed since the day Lila had died. Not a thing. Even the dust just recirculated and settled back exactly where it had come from. Lila’s clothes still hung in the wardrobe, her perfume still sat on the dressing table, her rings remained on the mantelpiece – all as if she had just stepped out of the room. The furniture was exactly as Lila had placed it, still hiding the bald spots on the rugs and covering the stains. Rachel had preserved it all. Like a more sanitary Miss Havisham, she had conserved Lila’s existence in an eternal tableau of fond memories.

There was no bitterness in her desire to maintain Lila’s home intact, just a need to hang onto something old, familiar and warm. Lila’s flat was a home in the way that The Limes never had been, or could have been. Lila had been happy in her London flat, away from her dysfunctional family and all that had come with it. Rachel tried relentlessly to preserve that happiness, constantly hoping that the essence of it would magically transfer itself to her one day.

The flat was her bolthole, her sanity. To someone else it would look precisely the opposite. Hard evidence of her instability. Proof of her inability to cope with real life. Would anybody else understand that if you could force time to stand still and preserve a perfect moment of tranquillity that you could step in and out of that place at will?

Lila (or strictly speaking Lilian) Porter had been the polar opposite of her brother. From what little she’d been told about her father, Rachel had deduced that where William had been dull, Lila had been a bright beacon of life. Where he had been mean-spirited, she had been generous to a fault. Where William had resented, Lila had embraced. In Lila’s company, everyone felt alive. Even Valerie had grudgingly liked her, until Lila had died and had left everything to Rachel. After that Valerie hadn’t liked anyone much.

Frances had needled Rachel to sell the flat – it was London real estate, worth a small fortune. Life-changing in the right hands. Valerie hadn’t thought that Rachel’s were remotely the right hands. Rachel had measured wealth differently and had hung onto the flat even though her decision had been one of the issues that had permanently damaged the family ties. The other issue she still couldn’t, and wouldn’t, talk about.

Ever.

Chapter 8

Delia tried Charlie’s mobile number and listened to the dull uninspiring voice on the message service for the umpteenth time. There was no point in leaving yet another message; he hadn’t bothered to pick up the last three. Why the bloody hell did people bother having mobile phones if they were always going to leave the bloody things switched off?!

In frustration, she slammed her own phone hard on the table, dislodging the battery cover in the process and sending it skipping over the tabletop and onto the floor. ‘Sod it!’ she hissed, bending to retrieve it and groaning at the stiffness in her back. She couldn’t be bothered to fiddle with it to reattach it to the body of the phone, damned thing.

A horrible sensation was unfurling in her gut, an instinct that something was about to go horribly wrong. Charlie was incommunicado and Rachel bloody Porter was back on the scene. Adding two and two together she was coming up with nothing other than four, no matter how hard she tried to make it five. If she was right and he was with Rachel, they might well have another dead body on their hands by the time she caught up with him and throttled him for his foolishness. She was too old for all this, and so was Charlie. He was a bloody idiot where that girl was concerned, always had been, always would be.

Delia just had to hope that Rachel wasn’t as big an idiot. If she was, then God help them all.

***

By the time Ratcliffe and Angie reached the hospital that evening, having been told that Frances had been woken, she had lost consciousness again.

According to her doctor she hadn’t said anything of note during the short time that she had been lucid. Ratcliffe’s only conversation had been with Peter Haines, Frances’s rather urbane yet supercilious husband, whose main concern remained the worry that his good name was being linked with something as tawdry as murder. Haines was adamant that he didn’t know where Stella had gone, but had reluctantly agreed to supply a photo of her, though he couldn’t guarantee a recent one.

He had only conceded to their request because Ratcliffe told him that his wife’s purge of The Limes had been so meticulous that they had failed to turn up even the remotest clue as to Stella’s whereabouts – or her intentions. Even with a photograph and the help of the press they would be clutching at straws. If a person as nondescript as Stella wanted to disappear, it wasn’t particularly difficult to make a thorough job of it.

Thwarted by Frances’s insentient state, Ratcliffe called it a day and sent Angie home. God knows they all needed a decent night’s sleep – this case was getting harder by the minute and he wanted to face it head on and fresh in the morning. He’d switched his phone to silent earlier as per hospital policy and hadn’t thought to check it until he got into his car.

He assumed that the message he’d received when it had vibrated in his pocket was from his wife, nagging to know when he would be home. It wasn’t. It was from Charlie Jones, informing him that he’d had to take Rachel back to London to see her doctor. As a man Ratcliffe saw that as a very good idea – the woman was apt to flake out all over the place in his experience, so some medical attention would be a fine thing. As a copper he saw it as yet more buggeration. He hadn’t quite finished with Ms Porter. Having her back in London was going to be an almighty pain in his arse. As if he didn’t have enough of those already.

***

Surprisingly there was a parking space right outside the flat. Instinctively Charlie reversed in and switched off the engine, only afterwards thinking that he should just drop her and drive away. Just the same as all those times long ago when he had stood on this very pavement, looking up at her windows with his courage failing and forcing him to leave things well alone. He had always driven away.

‘Are you going to come in?’ she asked, the tremor in her voice informing him that she was fervently hoping that he wouldn’t.

Out of stubbornness he didn’t even bother to reply, just got out of the van and followed her up the steps into the building.

Inside the flat he remained silent as the wraith of Lila Porter wrapped itself around him like a stale smell. The past felt almost tangible and he had the sensation that he was being ripped backwards through time. That nothing had materially changed in the place was weird; that Rachel had never bothered to change it was stranger still.

In resistance to his reaction he tried to put a positive spin on it and thought of Amy. How she would love this place. She would see it as a giant dressing-up box where she could pretend she was someone else entirely. She had always told him that her ultimate fantasy would be to travel back in time.

It seemed that her mother had achieved it.

Rachel hovered in the kitchen doorway, showing her reluctance to allow him further into her domain. ‘I can do coffee if you don’t mind it black.’

Charlie glanced around again, glimpsing her existence, finding it wanting and dusty and faded. ‘OK.’

He followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table under the window, keeping her in his line of sight, but maintaining a safe distance while he watched her fumble with the kettle. ‘So, what do you do with yourself then? Are you working?’ he asked, as if they were old acquaintances who had just bumped into each other. He felt as banal as the question had sounded.

She poured water in the cups and shook her head. ‘No.’

‘What do you do with yourself then?’ he pressed as she put the cups onto saucers and placed the whole paraphernalia on a tray just to bring it the few yards to the table. Just like her mother would have done – anything to keep up appearances.

She put the tray down, immediately silencing the rattling china that had been so effectively serenading her anxiety. ‘I read a lot, walk, watch the world go by. Time passes – I don’t notice it much.’

He picked up his cup, its dainty fragility looking incongruous in his calloused hand. It almost made him smile. ‘I half expected to find Stella here.’

Rachel hovered, seemingly reluctant to pick up her own cup. He noticed that her hands were still trembling. She gave a wry smile and shook her head. ‘She would never come here. Lila scared her. She had too much life for Stella.’

That a woman long dead yet still so tangibly present had the ability to dismay the living in such an assiduous way scared him a little too. ‘You know I said that Amy thinks you’re dead? She thinks that our relationship is sad and romantic and that I’m tortured by unrequited love and grief.’ He laughed, the sound of it full of scorn. ‘I’ve never had the heart to put her straight. And neither should you – whatever happens she needs to be kept out of this.’

‘I suppose it’s better for her to think that she was left by someone who didn’t choose to go,’ she said quietly. ‘But it’s going to be hard to stop her reading papers or watching the news. I can’t be responsible for that, but she’ll never find out from me.’

Charlie couldn’t help it. The bitterness of what Rachel had done had been burning a hole in his gut for years. That she could talk to him so calmly about it just felt like insult heaped upon injury. ‘Better than knowing that your own mother dumped you without a word? Yeah, I’d say so. Anything would be better than that,’ he said with potent bitterness because the truth of her words illustrated a threat that neither of them could control.

Lila’s kitchen clock ticked loudly, marking the moments that the ugliness of it all hung in the air between them. ‘Better than knowing why,’ she said finally.

He gripped the cup, almost crushing it in an effort not to hurl it at the wall and watch the jagged shards flail her as they fell. ‘What about me? I’m not a little girl who needs to be protected from life’s shit, Rachel,’ he hissed, watching her wince at the suppressed violence of his contained rage and not caring. ‘Don’t you think I deserve to know why?’

‘I didn’t love you; I didn’t want her. I made a mistake.’ Even though she closed her eyes when she said it, unable to look him in the eyes, her words sliced at him like a razor – sharp and sure. The extent of the damage would be delayed by the swiftness of the cut, but he would feel it and it would hit bone.

He stood, moved towards her slowly, every step an exercise in measured control. He felt drunk, surreal, and incapable of coherent thought.

Chapter 9

Peter Haines stared down at the unconscious form of his wife and wondered if he loved her. Wondered if anyone could truly love a woman like Frances? She was admirable in many ways: cultured, elegant and formidable. Qualities quite desirable in a partner, but traits that could hardly be termed as lovable.

This was the first time he had ever observed her in a state of relaxation, albeit enforced. She looked different, not soft, just less determined than she normally did. It was a strange experience to see a woman you had shared a bed with – shared a life with – transformed into a stranger because of a bump on the head. Quite disturbing really.

Before this he had always felt proud of her as a wife. She represented him well, even though she could be a little strenuous in her opinions at times, even though her proprietary efficiency was a little forced. She was a good wife, faithful, but passionless. Her emotions ran cold and had set like stone, only ever emerging as grit-toothed sound bites, and only then when necessary to keep up appearances.

Children might have helped. However, they had never come along, and if he were honest, he wouldn’t have known what to do if they had. He wasn’t a man able to tolerate mess and chaos so maybe it had been for the best. He had no memory of being a child, couldn’t relate to what it was like at all. Even in his mother’s house, proudly populated with pictures of decreasingly younger versions of himself, he couldn’t make the connection, just felt slightly embarrassed by the tight-lipped, two-dimensional boy that he saw staring back at him from the photographs. Sometimes he was sure that he’d been born old.

Despite all that, the one thing he had never, ever anticipated was the prospect of being associated with scandal. Part of the reason that he had chosen Frances for a wife was because her background was good. Her family were a little odd, but of good pedigree, or so he had been led to believe. Never would he have contemplated that they could be capable of the level of depravity that was splashed all over the newspapers. It had come as a shock.

In some respects his other recent discovery had been a greater shock. When Valerie had died both he and Frances had been relieved – not only were they free of an unlikeable burden, they also stood to inherit a share of The Limes. Initially he had held out hope that Valerie had made a will, cutting out Rachel and favouring Frances above Stella. Typically, she had not.

He had assumed that the process of probate would be lengthy but at least straightforward. He’d been wrong. A complication had emerged already. Not only had Valerie not left a will, neither had William, and to top that, there was no evidence that William Porter was actually dead. When Peter had heard from the solicitor that no death certificate was in evidence he had been incredulous until he had discovered that there was no grave either. No funeral had taken place; no notice had been in the papers. William Porter had simply disappeared into the ether.

The only will that had ever decreed ownership of the house was that made by Stella’s birth mother. Technically William still owned the property. For Peter, it was a nightmare situation – one that was costing him eighty-five pounds an hour every time their solicitor even thought about resolving it. If just one of the bodies found had been William, it would have been far more simple. Distasteful, but simple.

Now that he thought about it, the whole thing had been a sham. In selecting him as a husband, Frances had achieved respectability and had managed to disguise herself and her family so that they couldn’t be recognised for what they were. He’d been duped, all his assumptions now proved wrong.

Stella, the single most ineffectual example of the human condition he’d ever encountered, had been someone to be pitied. Valerie, with all her apparent her pride in Frances, had been nothing but guise and guile, all designed to ensnare him and link him to a family of felons and sycophants. As for Rachel, he’d been fortunate enough to never have met her. From what he’d heard it had been a lucky escape.

He couldn’t even bear to look at Frances lying there seeming so peaceful and oblivious. She had nothing worse than a head wound whilst his whole life had been torn apart by her lies. In a fit of pique and disgust he took the flowers he had bought for her and rammed them into the waste bin. He was a decent man, a good man – honourable and upright. He hadn’t been equipped for this deceit. Without a backward glance at his wife he stalked from the ward.

***

Amy was well and truly pissed off. Sent home from her nurse-training placement early, she had caught a train home and had been desperately trying to phone her dad since. Only he wasn’t answering his phone, and now she would have to catch a bus from the station. She hated buses, especially late buses. They were full of drunks, gobshites, and people with hygiene problems. Some had passengers that combined all three traits – they were the ones who always wanted to sit next to Amy.

She had never come home to an empty house, had never been turned down when she had asked for a lift, had never opened the fridge and found it empty of food. Dad was always there, always had been, and now he wasn’t she was more annoyed with him than she wanted to admit.

It was his fault she was now standing at a freezing bus stop next to a person who obviously had failed to see the relevance of the ‘i’ in iTunes. Tinny music was leaking from his earphones and intruding into her already abrasive mood. Where the fuck was her dad?

They needed to talk. About what was in the papers. About why he was in the papers.

She had been in the office writing up patient notes before handover, when the other student, that supercilious wanker Nick Gribble, had slapped a newspaper down on the desk. Everyone had looked up as he’d said, ‘Never told us your dad was a criminal, Amy.’

Mortification hadn’t been the word for it. She’d told him to fuck off and had got a bollocking from her supervisor and sent home. The prospect of bouncing off the walls in the nurse’s home hadn’t appealed, so she’d come ‘home’ home, and no one was going to be there. What made her most angry was the fact that if something like a bank had gone out of business and money was at stake, the fucking papers wouldn’t have even thought about raking something up that had happened over thirty years ago! Money always trumped people in a news story.

There was a photograph of Charlie taking up half the page. Because a woman who’d gone missing, and who had probably killed her husband and kid, had been a witness at her dad’s trial. Didn’t put a photograph of her in there, did they? How fair was that?

Neither he nor Gran had ever talked about why he’d been in prison. She’d always known he had been, ever since her second day at school when Lee Price, a noxious kid who always had dried snot on his jumper sleeve had said, ‘My mum said your dad is a murderer. He chopped your mum into little pieces.’

She’d stared at him in disbelief, trying to equate what he had said with her big, strong lovely dad. She’d been horrified and angry and had yelled, ‘At least I’ve got a hanky! I don’t wipe bogeys on my clothes.’

She still felt stupid when she thought about it.

Gran had picked her up from school that day, and had been shocked to see a bandage on her hand. Lee Price had stabbed her with a pencil over the snot jibe. The story had come out in a tearful torrent and Gran had told her that it was true that her dad had gone to prison, but that it wasn’t true that he’d killed anyone. His first wife had been killed, but not by him. Amy had taken this on her five-year-old chin, because if Gran said it, the ‘it’ was gospel.

She had never since questioned his innocence. Even though on occasion (mostly when she was pissed off with him, like now) she had been haunted by the thought that he did seem to have a habit of marrying people who had suffered untimely deaths.

After that Gran wouldn’t discuss it, and Amy had been warned on pain of death to ask her father about it. Even so, the story ate at her. The dead first wife became the antagonist in her nightmares and she’d had no choice but to find out what had happened.

When she was thirteen, she’d gone to the library and had mastered the mysteries of the microfiche machine and had read the reports of what her father was supposed to have done. It didn’t stand up in her mind: the words ‘frenzied attack’ in the same sentence as her father’s name were so incongruent she had laughed. Still did. In her imagination she had packed the whole thing away in the same box as her mother’s death. It was all in the mental filing cabinet labelled ‘Romantic Tragedies’ along with other things that were too difficult to think about very often.

As far as Amy was concerned, the fact that bodies had been found at The Limes proved that her dad was innocent beyond doubt. Whoever had been killing people in that house, it hadn’t been him. Whoever the killer was, they had more than likely framed him. Simple.

At least that’s what she believed on good days. That’s what she would tell someone if they asked. On not so good days, when the world felt full of impending doom, she saw it differently. She was torn then. Between what she wanted to believe and what her logical mind suggested to her. The conviction that her father was incapable of being a frenzied murderer was absolute, but the suspicion that he might be capable of great passion, immense rage and deep hurt created a worm of doubt that wriggled in her brain from time to time. She knew for a fact that he’d done anger management courses over the years. Yet he’d never once lost it with her.

All she could base her darker thoughts on were the facts that her father loved her with a devotion that bordered on obsession, and he still loved her mother. If Gran didn’t stay him, he would have locked his child in the house for life just so he could keep her safe. She wouldn’t just be wrapped in cotton wool; she would be buried in it.

He never had curbed her freedom but she could tell he wanted to. Only the voice of reason stopped him taking her to a desert island where she would be safe for ever. She knew he still loved her mother because he never talked about her, and if anyone asked him his face would cloud with hurt so intensely that no one dared ask him again. That couldn’t be anything else but love, could it?

If he had loved the first wife as much, would he have killed her rather than lose her to someone else? Amy knew for a fact that he would kill anyone who threatened her safety. He had said so often enough.

A few years before, she had shared her worries with her best friend Kayleigh. Kayleigh had said that the only way to find out if he had killed the first wife was to ask her via ‘spirit’. They had hidden themselves in Gran’s bedroom and made a Ouija board out of scrabble tiles and had invoked the spirit of Patsy. Gran’s room had been a good choice of venue – after all, how scary could anything be if it was experienced on a bed of quilted pink satin surrounded by kitten ornaments?

Bloody terrifying as it turned out. They had scared each other shitless.

Kayleigh had led the proceedings. Her mother owned a deck of Tarot cards and she was familiar with the ritual of such things, having been witness to many a prediction of handsome strangers and sudden windfalls. Kayleigh had laid the letters out in a circle and had written ‘yes’ and ‘no’ on two pieces of paper. On a third she had written ‘goodbye’. She’d placed them in the circle. In the middle, she put a glass tumbler.

They had debated the glass. It had a picture of Blackpool Tower on it and didn’t seem a serious enough object to use in the circumstances, but it was all they had to hand and neither of them thought that any restless spirit would be too concerned about a bit of kitsch. Kayleigh had said that any spirit manifesting in Delia’s bedroom would have to be oblivious to tat, otherwise they wouldn’t bother coming at all. Amy had laughed with her, but had felt mildly offended all the same.

They had both said the Lord’s Prayer, just in case, before each putting a tentative digit on the upturned glass. ‘Is anybody there?’ Kayleigh had asked, sounding like Boris Karloff in a bad horror film. Amy had nearly fainted when the glass started to move. She’d pulled her finger away, accusing Kayleigh of pushing it, which she strenuously denied, saying, ‘If you’re not going to take this seriously, I’m going home.’ There had been pouting and umbrage taken.

Amy had reassured her that she was deadly serious and they had tried again, watching as the glass propelled itself under their fingers. The first few words it spelled out were nonsense, not even real words. Only when Kayleigh asked for Patsy to communicate with them did anything significant happen.

‘Are you Patsy?’ Kayleigh asked the air.

Amy had shuddered as the glass moved towards the slip of paper bearing the word yes.

‘Were you murdered?’ was the next question. Again the glass moved to yes.

Kayleigh had stared at Amy, eyes wide. ‘Who murdered you?’

Amy had been barely able to breathe as the glass had moved around the circle in undecided moves, finally spelling out the words: ‘not him’.

‘See,’ Kayleigh had said, pleased with herself.

Scared and unconvinced, Amy had asked the question again, but nothing happened. The glass hesitated and quivered under their fingers. ‘Did my father kill you?’ she demanded, desperate for a reiteration that it wasn’t him.

The glass moved again, sweeping around the circle again and again in dramatic arcs, then stopping abruptly in front of the slip of paper, which said ‘goodbye’.

Unnerved by the experience, they had scooped the letters back into their little bag and shoved them back in the Scrabble box. They screwed up the notes Kayleigh had written and threw them into the bin. Kayleigh was convinced that Amy had conclusive proof that Charlie was not a murderer. Amy wanted to believe it but wasn’t sure. Her logical mind refused to allow her to accept that they had just communicated with a dead woman. But what else could it have been?

‘What’s up? You scared?’ Kayleigh had asked.

‘No,’ she’d lied. ‘I was just wondering, if we could do it again, see if we can talk to my mum?’

They had agreed to try it again the next time they had Gran’s house to themselves, probably Tuesday when Delia would be out at bingo again. They did, but absolutely nothing had happened at all. The glass hadn’t even attempted to move. Kayleigh had explained that it was because Rachel’s spirit was at rest. She had passed peacefully and wasn’t earthbound like Patsy.

Delia had put an end to any further forays into the paranormal. She had found the screwed-up words in her bedroom bin and had instantly worked out what they had been up to. Her attitude towards dabbling with the unknown had been expressed with enough fear and anger to dissuade Amy from trying it again for a very long time, especially when she had insisted that she couldn’t sleep soundly in that room afterwards.

Amy would never tell Delia whose spirit they had been trying to talk to, and suspected that her gran’s insistence that the bedroom was tainted by their activities was just an excuse to get Charlie to redecorate the other, larger room and move her things in there. Delia had even gone so far as to burn the Scrabble game – just in case it was tainted too. Her gran could be strange sometimes.

Amy hadn’t kept in touch with Kayleigh, not since they had left school and gone their separate ways. She missed her. There was no one else she could be as open with, or who knew so many of her secrets. However, given her experience with Nick Gribble, maybe that was a good thing. The less people knew about her, the better.

***

The bus finally arrived and she climbed aboard behind the iTunes idiot and found a seat at the back. She tried her dad’s number again, just to let him know she was on her way home. The call went straight to voicemail.

When she finally made it home she found the house quiet, dark and empty. Her first task was to turn on all the downstairs lights, then switch on the TV and crank up the heating, if only to drive the shadows and dark thoughts away.

She had half hoped to find a note from her father explaining where he was, but he hadn’t been expecting her home until the weekend. It was an irrational desire on her part, yet she was disappointed. ‘You are not the centre of the universe, Amy,’ she said, speaking out loud as if the sound of the words would have a greater chance of admonishing her selfishness than if she’d merely thought them.

For one lonely moment, she thought about ringing Gran but would have to explain why she’d been sent home in disgrace. It wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, she wandered out into the kitchen and began to rummage in the cupboards for something to eat. She found a pot noodle lurking at the back of the cupboard, but rejected it on the grounds that appealing as it was in principle, it would taste of reconstituted cardboard. They always did. Eventually she settled for a microwave pizza.

She picked at it, nibbling at bits of the topping as she watched TV mindlessly, trying to decide whether to have a bath, or ring round to see if anyone wanted company. In the end, she decided to work on an essay, a case study on one of the patients at Tynings – the elderly care unit where she had her placement. Bill had been the wrong patient to choose in a way. She couldn’t examine his past as nobody knew about it.

He had been a street drinker until the police sectioned him and he was admitted to the unit. Then he had been diagnosed with Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome, an alcohol-induced dementia. Because it was a rare diagnosis, he had seemed like an interesting case to study at the time; now that she had to produce fifteen thousand words on the man it was her worst choice ever. Bill wasn’t even a pleasant character – he was dirty, rude and he gave her the creeps. But it was too late to change now. The essay was due in a week and she would just have to make the best of it.

***

The doorbell rang, jolting her out of her reverie with the subtlety of a brick. A plump woman with a vaguely familiar face stood on the doorstep.

‘Sorry to bother you, love. Is Charlie in?’

‘He’s not in at the moment. I can get him to ring you when he gets back,’ she said politely. If your dad was a builder it wasn’t unusual to have neighbours you didn’t know banging on the door because they’d locked themselves out and wanted to borrow a ladder, or they had a leak, a blockage or some emergency they couldn’t fix themselves.

‘Oh no, don’t worry, I only wanted to drop this off to him – only I thought it might be important.’ She reached into her pocket and handed a broken SOS bracelet to Amy. ‘I think your mum must have dropped it when she had that fit in the café today, poor woman. I hope she’s feeling better now. Quite a thing to see when you’re having a quiet coffee of a morning and minding your own business!’ she said with a laugh. ‘I didn’t find it until after they’d gone or I would have given it to her then, but I remembered seeing your dad’s van parked on the drive so I thought I would drop it off on my way home. It’s lucky really – I wouldn’t have had a clue what to do with it if I hadn’t recognised your dad. He did a lovely job on my sister’s extension. Anyway, I must be off. Hope your mum is better, love,’ she said as she waddled off down the drive.

‘Thanks,’ Amy said.

The word was so quiet, it wafted into the night unheard.

She shut the door and stared at the bracelet, puzzled. Perhaps the woman had the wrong Charlie Jones. But she couldn’t have – she’d said she recognised him. It dawned on her that maybe he did have a girlfriend, one he hadn’t told her about, one who had a habit of having fits in public places. Perhaps that was where he was now, in hospital with this sick woman – whoever she was. She pried open the bracelet to get a look at this woman’s details. If her dad had met someone, she had a right to know her name at least.

She had to look twice at the tiny piece of paper. The name inside the identity bracelet belonged to Rachel Jones, with the Jones crossed out and Porter scribbled in next to it. But it couldn’t be. That was the name of her mother, and her mother was dead.

This couldn’t be right.

The truth didn’t dawn – it hit her full pelt like a punch, leaving her reeling from the impact. She felt sick.

She threw the bracelet across the hall as if it was a toxic, physical lie. Staring at it she half hoped it would dematerialize and take itself away from her like it had never existed. But it remained on the bottom stair – tauntingly real.

The address had said Bayswater. She shook her head and went back into the lounge. She would prove this wrong. At most, this would be a coincidence. Her family couldn’t have lied to her about this. It wasn’t possible; they weren’t that cruel.

She had discovered that the internet was a wonderful thing a long time ago. You could find out pretty much anything if you knew where to look, and 192.com was a good place to start. All you needed was a name, and a vague idea of location, then you could find out someone’s phone number, address, and even whether they were registered to vote. Rachel Porter had no phone, but she was on the electoral roll. She did exist.

Amy still wasn’t quite convinced that this Rachel Porter was the same Rachel who had married her father and died in childbirth like the tragic heroine of her fantasies. There would have to be a death certificate, a record of her mother’s demise, and she knew exactly where to look. Her dad had a trunk at the end of his bed where he kept his personal things. If the evidence she needed was anywhere it would be in there. Dispassionately she headed for the stairs, fully prepared to break into his privacy without a second thought.

Most of what she found consisted of old business accounts, copies of VAT Returns and the like. There were drawings and Father’s Day cards that she had made for him over the years, all wrapped in the shawl she had used as a baby. Before this she would have thought how sweet he was to cling onto such things, but at that moment in time she was so angry with him she wanted to tear everything to shreds.

At the bottom of the trunk was a tin box, its hasp sealed with a small padlock. She had never picked a lock, wouldn’t have had a clue how to do it and didn’t fancy spending hours pissing about with a hairgrip and getting nowhere. Neither was she prepared to waste time looking for the key. Her father was a security-conscious man, had spent too long in the company of felons not to be, so wherever the key might be, she would be unlikely to find it easily. Instead she ran down to the garage, taking the box with her, and broke it open with a pickaxe, the contents exploding all over the concrete floor on the third blow.

The box was ruined and she couldn’t have cared less; she was only interested in the contents.

Sure enough, she found her own birth certificate, and his and Rachel’s marriage certificate. No death certificate. Just a pile of letters addressed to HM Prison, Dartmoor.

She opened one and realised that they were the letters her mother had sent to him in prison. She opened more, scanning the handwriting and seeing that some were from her gran too. Only one envelope stood out from the others – it was stiff and large, addressed to their house, so more recent than the rest. It was from a London solicitor, from Rachel’s solicitor, warning Charlie not to contact or visit or they would have no alternative but to apply for an injunction against him. ‘My client has no wish for further contact with you,’ she read.

The letter was dated fifteen years ago when Amy had been five. Rachel had been alive and hadn’t wanted to see them. Hadn’t wanted to know her own daughter. The woman had gone so far as to threaten legal action if Charlie even tried.

If Amy’s mood had been angry before, this discovery only served to fuel the flames. Now she was incandescent! Her mother was alive and it looked like she was a complete bitch. What kind of woman walked away from her own child? Anger gave way to a swathe of hurt that scythed through her and nearly took her off her feet. Mind reeling, she tried to absorb what it all meant, what it said about her – Amy – the child her mother didn’t want. The sensation of abject sorrow was too much to bear and she had to shut the feeling away and cling onto the anger.

Not that she knew who it was for yet: the mother she’d believed was dead, her father for the lie, or her gran. But you didn’t get angry with Gran. Life wasn’t worth living if you got on her wrong side. As much as she was loving and kind, she could turn, and when she turned, she turned nasty. No, Gran wasn’t the one she could run to, not about this. Not about anything that challenged her cosy world. Now that she had locked the emotions down, she could be rational and work out what she needed to do. Because she had to do something.

Rachel’s address was etched into her mind. It was simple. She would go there and confront the woman who had faked her own death to abandon her family. Amy wanted to know why, and she wanted to know now.

Back in the house it took only moments to look up train times and find that if she was quick she could be on a train in forty-five minutes and in London an hour and a half after that. She took the letters and stuffed them in her backpack. She also took her father’s secret stash of cash. Five hundred pounds, rolled up and secured with an elastic band and kept hidden in a piece of spare waste pipe in the back of the sink unit cupboard. He thought she didn’t know about it, but she had watched him many a time unscrew the dummy pipe and store his money. He owed her for all this, so she wasn’t going to feel bad about taking it.

As she headed across the sitting room towards the door, she looked towards the mantelpiece and saw the photograph of her father holding her. She had been about four and was sitting on his shoulders and they were both grinning at the camera. It was a mutual favourite picture and she couldn’t remember a time when it hadn’t been on display somewhere in the house. The sight of it stirred the feelings she was trying so hard to suppress.

She picked up the picture and hurled it against the wall, wincing as the image shattered, littering the floor with tiny shards of glass. She was sick of it! It wasn’t real. None of it had been real. Not this house, not her dad, not this life. For good measure, she followed the picture with the plate of cold pizza, watching in satisfaction as it slid slowly down the wall, leaving a trail of cold congealed gunk in its wake.

Satisfied, she stalked from the house, slamming the front door so hard that the glass pane at the top cracked from the impact.

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