The Lost Sister (21 page)

The death of the dog changed everything.

“I know it sounds strange,” she said, “but until he killed Chess, I believed he loved me.”

For all the things he did to her, she said, she still saw something human in him.

When he brought Chess into the house, it was the last time she believed that he would do anything out of the goodness of his heart.

“I was paralysed after that night. If he could do that to the dog…what could he do to me?”

It was a recurring pattern. Every time she found some connection outside of Wickes, he took it away from her. His insistence that she sever all ties with family and friends. The way he put the kibosh on any friendships she might have made when they went out.

After Wickes killed Chess, he didn't need to lock the doors. Deborah stayed inside.

“I didn't want to go anywhere. I just wanted to die.”

Two nights after the dog's death, she took a knife from the kitchen, tried opening her wrists. Failed. The marks were still on her arms, pink ridges on her otherwise smooth skin. “I don't think they'll ever go away.”

Like the worst kind of memories.

Any normal person would have rushed her to hospital. Wickes took care of her himself.

“After that, he appeared to show genuine remorse. Kept telling me how he did everything that he did for my safety. How I was all that mattered to him in the world.”

Susan said, “Did you believe him?” Her voice harsh.

Deborah hesitated before saying anything. “I don't know.”

After the suicide attempt, the balance shifted again. Wickes encouraged her to rekindle her painting. Wanted her to find a hobby. Anything to keep her interested.

Soon enough, he relaxed his rules.

Guilt? Maybe.

For all his psychosis, I couldn't help thinking about the look he got in his eyes when he talked about Deborah. His face would soften in a fashion that's hard to fake. I genuinely believed that he thought he was in love with her.

“I might have loved him again,” Deborah said. “But the dog…I couldn't stop thinking about Chess lying there on the ground, his body shaking and his mouth foaming. His eyes…I remember him looking up at me…and I couldn't help thinking he was asking me why this was happening. What he had done to deserve a death like this.”

It worried Deborah, haunted her dreams at night.

“I would wake up, feeling like there was a weight pressing down on me. On my chest. And I knew it was Chess, that the bastard had gone and dug up his wee corpse, that's he'd thrown the dead dog in bed with me for a laugh. There was never anything there, of course.”

I knew there wasn't, but the fear was so potent that her nightmares would seem real to her even after waking. I understood that.

But what the incident with Chess had done to destroy any trust between them was to make her worry what he would do if he ever discovered the one secret she had managed to keep from him.

“You can't walk away from your own child. Your flesh and blood. It's impossible. You can talk about it all you want, but in the end, you'll wind up missing them. There'll be a hole in your life. And you can ignore it. Refuse to acknowledge it. But it'll be there. In one form or another, and I don't think anyone will ever be able to fill it entirely.” Deborah looked away from Susan to me. “I don't know if it's different for men. Or if it's just me. But Mary was part of me for nine months. We shared a body. We shared things that she could never have with that – with Jennifer Furst. You can't just let that go.”

Even when Wickes told her what she stood to lose if she retained any contact at all with her family, her friends, her daughter, she couldn't just let go so easily.

And the way she looked at the arrangement, she was allowed one secret. How could it matter if you retained a link with someone who didn't even know who you were?

She had a photograph.

Taken from the Furst family home. Sneaked inside her pocket that night she broke in.

In the bothy's kitchen, she pulled that photograph out from the rear pocket of her jeans and unfolded it: battered and lined and faded with the years. But none of that mattered.

Mary had been a beautiful baby, in a white dress with a lace collar, pictured against the background of a family Christmas. The tree and the presents in the background. She was surrounded by ripped and crumpled wrapping paper, smiling as she hugged her new toy; a large white dog with big black eyes and a felt tongue that hung loose from its dumbly gaping mouth.

“I showed this picture to Mary. She said she had the dog until she turned ten and then she lost it somewhere. She doesn't remember where. She called it Glen. Doesn't know where the name came from. Maybe Jennifer gave it to her. Maybe it was just a word that stuck, aye? Who knows?” Deborah smiled as she handed us the picture to look at. Again, the kind of smile I had difficulty ever imagining Jennifer Furst using when she thought about her daughter.

What had Susan said earlier about my getting emotionally involved?

Both Susan and I dutifully examined the image and passed it on. It wasn't important to us. But Deborah needed for us to look as though there might be something in that image that would make us understand everything.

Maybe I wanted to see it, too.

She needed us to be on her side. It had been so long since anyone had taken the time to truly listen to and understand her that she was desperate to make her feelings known; reaching out for anyone who might empathise with her.

I wanted to pull her close and tell her that everything was going to work out. But I didn't.

Couldn't.

Part of Wickes's makeup plan had been to offer Deborah the chance to apply for an art course at a local college. She'd never completed her degree at Duncan of Jordanstone back in Dundee. And Wickes understood the need for her to feel she had some freedom. It wasn't that he was without heart, but he understood the kind of difficulties he would face without taking some kind of affirmative action.

The kindest acts sometimes come from the cruellest place.

She took the offer, under a series of strict rules. Similar to those imposed on her when she first moved in with him.

Deborah started to convince herself that Wickes was calming down.

The incident with Chess had been a one-off. Oh, aye, he didn't mean it. Just had a mean temper. And forget that, look at all that he had done to help her.

He was her saviour, right?

Wasn't that what she wanted?

Wasn't that what he told her?

He wouldn't do anything that wasn't in her best interests.

Easy to think that when the bruises began to fade. When the memory of that night in the cupboard, huddled together with the corpse of a poisoned dog began to fade like the worst nightmares always do.

A few months after she started, she went out for a swift drink with someone she'd met on the course. A young guy – young enough she wasn't that interested in him – with a good line in jokes who didn't seem to take himself quite as seriously as some of the others in the class.

A drink was all she was after. A drink in someone else's company. Without the Big Man's presence looming over here.

She had a good night, too. Until the guy went to the bathroom. Never came back.

That was when Wickes sat down across the table from her, this grin on his face like he knew something she didn't.

“A child with a guilty secret,” she said. “He could look like that, sometimes, when he'd done the most terrible things.” Stumbling again. Dancing around the edges of her life with Wickes had become second nature. She knew that he had done terrible things. But when it came to the specifics, perhaps there was still some of that old fear left in her. If she talked about it, admitted the truth, she knew what he could do. What he
would
do. “I knew something had happened. I didn't…I mean…I thought that he'd gone over the edge. Killed that lad. Just for talking to me, you know?”

When they went home at the end of the night, Wickes acted as though nothing had happened.

The next morning, she went to class as usual. The guy wasn't there.

“He ever turn up?”

Deborah looked surprised at Susan's question. The answer should have been obvious. “I asked the course convener about it, why he hadn't come back. She said she'd talked to him, some kind of personal issue meant he wasn't able to continue the course.”

The call meant that Wickes hadn't killed the man. Deborah could cling to that, at least. Getting roughed up was better than winding up dead. But the message from Wickes was clear: he was all she ever needed.

That was when she began to worry for Mary. That night brought everything into focus for her.

Funny the way the brain works sometimes, the connections that it makes. How one incident can lead you to see another – unconnected – in a whole new light.

She'd kept that picture of Mary. Her one betrayal.

It had seemed insignificant at the time.

Would Wickes see it like that?

When she graduated, Deborah applied for a teaching course. Again, Wickes loosened her leash.

The “leash” metaphor was apt. She felt like a pet; a dumb animal who couldn't look after herself. That was how he treated her, how she sometimes came to think of herself.

Her world became defined by praise or condemnation from this bastard. Any disobedience was punished. Any glimmer of independent idea was squashed.

Her only rebellion: the photograph.

A baby on Christmas morning.

Her baby.

What might have been
.

She enjoyed the freedom she was allowed. Took to the teaching job with enthusiasm and dedication. Was careful to avoid socialising with other members of staff, became aware of her reputation as talented but cold. Figured she was protecting everyone else, didn't care what they thought of her for it.

I remembered Ms Foster telling me how Deborah had rarely socialised with any other teachers at the school. How when she came close to talking about anything personal, she would leave or change the subject.

She was a martyr. Suffered in silence.

Something romantic in that, or so she started to tell herself.

Every night, she locked herself in the bathroom, looked at that picture.

Imagined the girl that the baby had grown into.

Knew what Wickes would do if he discovered the truth. If he knew what she was thinking.

“The teaching gave me a way out,” she said. “While I was in school, I was out of his sight for a while. I felt relaxed. I felt…like me again.”

I asked, “When did you think about tracking down your daughter?”

“I heard about an opening in Dundee. Knew that I would be stupid to come back. But all the same…fifteen years. Who would remember me, right? And just to have that connection –” She stopped talking for a moment, and I thought maybe she wouldn't be able to go on. She had been talking for almost twenty minutes, only the occasional interruption from me or Susan.

Then: “He thought that I was his. That he owned me. And maybe he did, but as long as I had the picture…I don't know, if he had taken that away from me, maybe things would have been different. The picture gave me hope. Reminded me that there was something I wanted outside of the world that he defined for me. I couldn't just walk away, of course. And I knew I had to be careful. Had to make him believe that he had won. That he had broken me completely.” She took several deep breaths, as though she was about to duck her head beneath water with no idea when she would come back to the surface. “Took me a long time, but I had him convinced. I started taking more chances. He started to look at me less intently, believing that I was too scared to do anything that would upset him.”

That was when she got back in touch with her sister. Kathryn helped her to set up an escape, helped her with the move back to Dundee.

“I was away. He didn't know where I'd gone. I left nothing behind.”

Wickes had told me that it had only been the last few weeks he realised something was wrong, made it sound like he'd come here the minute he realised something was wrong.

“I was here for months. He talks a good game, Mr McNee but in the end he didn't help me disappear like he promised. He just isolated me from the world. Made me afraid. He talks like he could hunt anyone to the ends of the earth, but that's all it is. Talk. He's full of hot fucking air. Only thing he can do well is hurt people.”

But even if he wasn't so smart as he liked to make out, he still tracked her down. “I heard there was someone asking around about me. A few of my colleagues at the school, they said that some bearded guy had been asking how well they knew me, where I lived, if they had my number. Because we'd been on a few dates and he's lost my contact details.”

That had been when she'd realised what was happening. She'd already told Mary the truth, made the girl promise not to tell anyone. It was their secret. But now, she had to be sure that the girl trusted her. Because if the incident with Chess had taught her anything about Wickes, it was that he didn't care who or what he hurt.