Tell Tale (33 page)

The woman nods again. ‘If the police say so,’ she replies. The toes of her shoes rub together relentlessly. ‘Then it must be true.’

‘Do you know who that fourth person was?’ Adam says. His voice is as tight as piano wire.

‘If I’d have known that, don’t you think I’d have told the police back then?’ The woman sits upright in her chair. ‘I told them everything I knew in court.’ A veil of impatience drops over her face. Through it, she eyes me, squinting, perhaps remembering. Her fingers are restless on her lap, mirroring mine.

‘Sometimes,’ Adam says, hesitating, ‘people are afraid to tell everything they know.’

The woman’s head jolts round to the fire. The embers glow within her dark irises. ‘People came and went all the time,’ she confessed. ‘There were gatherings. Men from the village came up to the children’s home regularly. They had some kind of club going. That other man could have been anyone.’

Adam and I daren’t move – him because he fears that taking notes or holding the tape recorder any closer will stop her talking, and me because I can’t stand to hear what I already know.

‘I kept out of it. My concern was looking after them kids. Right pathetic, some of them.’ She leans forward and jabs at the fire with a poker. I see her brandishing it, yelling, then I see her quiet as a lamb with kids nestled around her as they listened to a story. ‘Dirty business went on down those
corridors. Best not to know. I just kept my head down, did my job, got paid. Wasn’t any other work around here.’

‘Do you remember a little girl called Betsy?’ Adam clears his throat and coughs. It doesn’t hide his sadness.

‘She was the last one to die, weren’t she?’ The woman finishes what Adam couldn’t bring himself to say. There’s a look in her eyes – glazed, regretful, fearful.

‘Yes.’

‘Poor wretch. It was because of her that all them perverts were locked up. Dirty, dirty business,’ she says again.

‘What was she like?’ Adam leans forward eagerly, his elbows resting on his knees and the Dictaphone stretched forward as much as he dare without putting her off.

And suddenly I see it all revealed in his eyes. He doesn’t care about Roecliffe Hall or the people in it. Adam wants to prove that his little sister’s existence wasn’t a waste. His book isn’t about Roecliffe’s past, it’s about salving his conscience. He wasn’t there to save his sister when she needed him, so he’s trying to do it now. He wants the fourth person – the one who killed Betsy – found and convicted. He wants to put things right.

The woman thinks, trying to find the correct words. ‘All them kids were well looked after,’ she says. ‘Some of them had their problems, of course. Most had been dumped by parents who didn’t want them, or they were orphans.’

I screw up my eyes.

‘But what about Betsy?’ Adam asks impatiently.

‘She was a funny little thing. All eyes and curls and not much to say for herself.’

‘Go on.’

I stare at her, making sure she knows I’m listening intently. Then it’s as if a switch has been flicked inside her, turning off her memory. Her lips draw together as if someone has pulled a string. ‘I don’t remember anything else.’

‘Did she have any friends?’ Adam asks. Perhaps he is hoping to track them down, find out more. But the woman is already standing, indicating she has had enough of us.

‘She had one friend,’ she says, looking over at me. The news relaxes Adam’s shoulders. ‘No one knows what happened to her though.’

‘But what about the fourth man? The one that was never identified.’ Adam is filled with panic. He doesn’t want the meeting to end. I can see his mind whizzing with all the things he was going to ask. There may not be another opportunity. ‘They say that he was the one that—’

‘The hooded one?’ she asks, suddenly interested again. ‘None of the others arrested would tell. They offered more lenient sentences if they gave a name, but they all clammed up. That’s what them lot do, protect each other. Don’t suppose they’ll ever get him now.’

I stand up, feeling sick and dizzy. I need to get out. I can’t believe I was stupid enough to set foot outside the school grounds again. I don’t feel safe.

‘Goodbye, Patricia,’ I say, head down, indicating that we are done, that we will be going, that she will never see us again. Adam follows my lead, reluctant, deflated, yet somehow relieved. There is a triangle of silence on the doorstep as a three-way nod marks our departure.

Adam slams the car door shut; drives off.

My fingernails dig into my palms. I turn to the side window; press my forehead against the glass. I don’t say a word. Suddenly Adam slews the car into a gateway and roughly pulls me round by the shoulders, staring into my eyes with such intensity that I’m not sure if he’s going to kiss me or hit me. He does neither.

‘How did you know her first name?’

‘Didn’t you say it when we arrived?’

‘No.’ I flinch as his words strike back. ‘I didn’t even know her first name was Patricia. How did you know? Have you met her before? Tell me, Frankie. For God’s sake tell me what you know.’

I stare at Adam, fully believing that he’s going to keep me holed up until I divulge everything. Only when I start weeping does he silently drive back to school, fingers drumming impatiently on the wheel; on my heart.

Sometimes Betsy and I tracked huge circles round the lawn while I told her stories about when my mother was alive. How she’d plait my hair while I sat on the edge of her bed; how she’d let me lick the batter from the whisk after she’d baked; how she let me feel the lump growing in her neck.

Betsy had some stories to tell too, but they were disjointed snaps of pain barked from a mouth that didn’t know any better. We trod a careful path through the bluebell woods as obscenities flowed out, similar, I thought now I was old enough to understand, to her constant wetting and soiling.

‘See those buds?’ I said, bending down. ‘Those are going to be the bluebell flowers. They’re beautiful. They make the woods look underwater when they come out.’

Betsy worked as hard as she could to snap and destroy as many plants as she could until I caught and restrained her.

‘Get off!’

‘Betsy, why do you do things like that?’ Her behaviour, even aged eight, was no better than a naughty toddler’s. I’d tried to show her right from wrong, good from bad, but every time I thought I was making progress, every time she
showed me a glimmer of understanding, they went and knocked it out of her again. There was nothing I could do to stop her being taken; to stop them cutting up and reshaping the essence of her soul. I worried that she would never be normal.

‘Hate them,’ she said, yanking from my grip. ‘And I hate you!’ She spat a foamy globule at my sweater and her eyes fizzed with mischief. Being bad was her way of taking control. Her way of showing the world that however terrible things got, she could do something worse.

‘No, Betsy,’ I said, pulling her pants back up. ‘Wait until we get home.’ Reluctantly, she did as she was told and we continued with our walk through the woods. We joined the path that we were all herded along on a Sunday when we went to chapel.

‘I want a picnic,’ Betsy cried. She stopped and lay down on the twig-and leaf-covered ground and mimicked eating a sandwich. It was the exact place we’d had our last picnic and it seemed a lifetime ago. The carers didn’t bother to do anything nice for us these days. Since the home won the award and escaped closure like all the others, it was as if everyone had breathed a huge sigh of relief and didn’t need to bother.

I was counting the days until I could leave. At seventeen, I’d soon be able to get out, get a job, live on the street if I had to. Life after Roecliffe had always seemed impossible, light years away, as if disappearing or something worse was the only choice. I’d already decided that I would be taking Betsy with me.

As fast as they came into the home, kids vanished like whispers – nothing left of them other than their belongings in the drawers. It eventually struck me that the ones who went were the ones who had no one to bother about them. At weekends, some kids would get trips out with their mums or grandparents. Others would spend a week with a foster family. A few would even be allowed back to their real homes for good.

These kids rarely got taken in the night, didn’t suffer at the hands of men in hoods, didn’t know what it was like to have their backs lashed or their bodies bent open. Maybe I’d noticed this, unconsciously, sooner than I realised. Maybe that’s why I’d spent so many years of my life waiting for Dad’s car to cruise down the drive – to prove that there was someone out there who would miss me if I mysteriously disappeared; that I wasn’t a good choice, that someone cared.

Only a part of me truly believed I waited for my dad because I loved him and he loved me right back. I only saw him a handful of times during my teen years. He was usually drunk. Once, he fell off his chair in a café and was taken off in an ambulance. I walked five miles back to Roecliffe when I could have walked five miles in the opposite direction.

Betsy screamed. She stared at the chapel and peed herself. I scooped her up in my arms, puffing under her weight. She was tall for her age. A damp patch formed on my waist. ‘We’re not going in,’ I told her. Everyone hated going to the chapel, sitting through the mighty sermon that
Mr Leaby took it upon himself to deliver once we had finished singing hymns. There was no vicar or chaplain. Just Mr Leaby and another man from the village.

‘Unclean thoughts don’t remain thoughts for long,’ he told us once. ‘Just remember that your bodies were born dirty and only with God’s forgiveness will they be cleansed. Pure thoughts lead to a pure body.’

Another time he told us a story about a little boy who told fibs. ‘Crying wolf,’ they call it. ‘It’s a sin to tell tales,’ Mr Leaby said, red-faced and looking like my dad did when he was about to pass out. ‘No one will believe you anyway,’ he instructed, ramming home to every one of us that telling tales was wrong, that our tongues would be ripped out by the stalks if we dared breathe a word of our sinful thoughts.

They told me that my dad was dead. Mr Leaby, with Patricia standing beside him as if she’d switched allegiances, broke the news one morning. Apparently it had happened three weeks ago and they’d only just remembered to tell me. They said, as I waited for the tears to come, that there wasn’t any money, that his things had been taken away, sorted out, bank accounts dealt with, that the house was being sold. His divorce from Patricia hadn’t quite gone through, I was told. She’d been kind enough to take care of affairs, so I shouldn’t worry.

The tears didn’t come and I walked slowly back to my dormitory. Betsy was sitting on my bed cutting her hair. Strands of gold feathered from her head. She giggled at the
sight of it. Her forehead was bleeding where she’d caught herself with the scissors.

‘Are you sad?’ she asked.

‘My dad’s dead.’

‘You’re like me now,’ she said.

I nodded and bowed my head towards her so that she could hack off my hair. Betsy dropped the scissors and hugged me close. ‘I’ll look after you,’ she told me, and I fell on the bed, sobbing until my lungs collapsed. My cries weren’t because I wanted my dad. I was crying because now there was no one to miss me; no one to stop
them
coming in the night.

‘Spill,’ he says. His breath smells of cigarettes and Polos. Since we’ve been back he’s smoked virtually an entire pouch of Golden Virginia and crunched his way through two packets of mints as if that will counter the reek he’s making in his room.

I’m pacing like an animal, treading the old boards like a lioness in a cage. Adam hasn’t moved from the door, reaching across to a small table to flick his ash into an old coffee cup. ‘You’re not leaving until you tell me.’

‘I’ll scream,’ I warn him. It’s hot in his room. Central heating pipes clank and gurgle beneath the bowed floor. ‘Sylvia will hear.’

‘I’m not letting you out until you tell me how you knew Miss Eldridge’s first name.’ Adam is quite calm about my kidnapping, but still angry nonetheless. He pushes up his white shirt sleeves, feeling the heat too, and leans sideways on the door. ‘I’m quite happy to stand here for the rest of term if need be.’

I curse in my head. I refuse to show him I’m bothered. I can’t allow Adam to think he can unravel my past to patch up his own.

‘OK,’ I say finally. I’ve whipped up a vague story that will no doubt knit itself into believable form once the words leave my lips. Over the last two decades, I’ve become adept at fabricating just enough truth from too many lies. Tell the same tale enough times and it becomes reality. ‘I’ll tell you.’

Adam melts away from the door with relief. He plants himself on the bed in a cloud of smoke and waits for me to speak.

It’s like this,
I hear in my head, although the words don’t actually come out.
Years ago, I knew someone who had an aunt working at Roecliffe Children’s Home. Turns out that was Miss Eldridge. I met her at a fundraising event and . . .

‘Adam, I . . .’ My mouth is dry. I sit down on the desk chair. The cushion is scrunched and lumpy beneath me. I pull it out and hug it to my chest.
I used to work with someone who was brought up in the children’s home. She once mentioned Patricia Eldridge’s name. That’s all. Nothing sinister.

I dig my fingers into the feathers. My mouth is open, gulping like a goldfish, but nothing comes out. I stare into his eyes. Those colouring-pencil blue eyes leach the lies from me. I am captivated and mesmerised, drowning in the truth as it fights for a voice. I see his sister. Hear her calling out through the years. I am the link between them. If I tell one more tale, they will be lost from each other forever. I take a deep breath. It comes out in slow motion.

‘Adam, my father dumped me at Roecliffe Children’s Home when I was eight. I lived here for ten years.’

A hurricane rushes through me, purging, destroying, cleansing. The noise is deafening, almost preventing what
spills out next. ‘I knew your sister. I was the one who looked after Betsy. I was virtually her mother.’