The Silent Ones (11 page)

Melanie took the cup of tea that Andy gave her and stared at them hovering round her bed. ‘Why are you both staring at me like that?’

She wasn’t as clairvoyant as she claimed she was, otherwise she would have known, Darren thought.

‘They’ve found Molly Peters’s body on the South Downs,’ Dad said. ‘Olivia told them where it was last night.’ Melanie put the tea down on the bedside table. ‘They are widening the search to see if any other bodies—’

‘Carly’s not there. I can feel it.’

‘Melanie—’

‘She’s not there!’ She swung her arm out with a cry and sent the tea hurtling across the room, spraying Andy with hot liquid. ‘Just get out! Just get out!’

‘Jesus, Melanie, look at yourself!’ Dad was pulling down his trousers, hopping round the bedroom to get the heat away from his skin. ‘Why is this my fault? Why is it always my fault?’

‘She’s not dead!’

‘She was my daughter too!’

Melanie was out of the bed then, a look of pure hatred on her face. ‘You can believe what you want. I’ll never believe she’s dead. Get out, get out before I throw you out.’

Murder didn’t bring the grieving together, Darren thought; it forced them away from each other. Grief had made his mum so tall that she towered over Dad and demoted him to a place where he couldn’t reach her. Darren retreated down the stairs, his parents’ argument rebounding with increasing intensity above his head. At that moment Carly had never seemed so far away, the hole she left behind so distorted and unfillable. He had brought this about. His poorly thought-through actions had placed this grenade at the heart of his family and he had pulled out the pin.

But there was something even worse. He wanted to see Olivia again. He was desperate to see her – to listen to her lies, to listen to every bit of rubbish that spewed from her mouth. And if he couldn’t see her, he could get close to her psychiatrist. He had to get back to Roehampton.

He was taking his bike from the garden through into the kitchen when he noticed the flat tyre.

He shouted up the stairs. ‘Mum, I need the car.’

When their argument didn’t stop he picked up the key and left.

T
raffic was bad, seemingly snarled up all over south London. Darren ended up in a long queue on the road that ran to the prison, shunting forward one car at a time, first gear, second gear. An ambulance passed him at speed, a jangle of noise bearing down on the gates of Roehampton.

He saw the TV vans and the crowd of reporters when he was eight cars away from the gates; the hatchbacks of the journalists parked up high on the opposite verge. They were reporting on Olivia, filling in the wait for police confirmation on the South Downs bones with speculation and gruesome rehashing of the events of ten years ago. The queue inched forward. Ten years fell away as he remembered the reporters who were often outside his house in Brighton back then, swarming forward as Dad parked the car. Darren had moved past their large bellies and recording equipment then, sometimes with his face squashed next to his mother’s skirt, at other times his hand gripped like a vice by his nan. Later some of them came in the house as his mum gave interviews, the strange smell of their aftershave and cigarettes lingering in the hall.

The crowd here was large, thirty people at least. Panic enveloped him. Some of those men and women would be the same ones as ten years ago – back on a case that was never solved, the ones who wrote the books, who sold his family’s pain for money. And they would recognise him as he drove slowly through the gates. It was their job to question and to enquire and they would know who he was, and they would wonder what the hell was happening.

Darren slammed the car into reverse and backed up to the bumper behind him. He signalled to turn out of the queue, hoping he was still too far away from the gates for anyone to see him. A car two in front of him was doing the same, hurriedly reversing to do an awkward five-point turn in the street and head away. Darren watched until the old Ford Fiesta was clear so he could complete his manoeuvre. The Fiesta’s driver was the young befriender who had been waiting to visit Olivia. Darren watched as he drove away at speed. He didn’t want to be seen by the reporters, just as Darren didn’t.

A car far back in the queue honked. The traffic was speeding up, the obstruction further ahead cleared. Darren put up an ‘indulge me’ hand and did a three-point turn in the road, seeing the heads of the reporters turning his way. As he accelerated away he saw Helen, three cars back, staring at him as he went past.

H
elen leaned forward in her seat, trying to get her armpit in the air conditioning stream. She had started sweating more lately, waves of it attacking her like some foreign invasion. As if being forty-four wasn’t demeaning enough, her body had to start protesting at her driving to work. Whenever she thought about her bastard husband Joel the sweats would come on, flights of anger and scorn rising up in her. Her old university friend Liz counselled her to not be bitter and so she woke every morning saying it to herself like a mantra. But it didn’t work, it did not work. Joel, aged forty-five, her husband of twelve years, had left her for a 25-year-old who ‘really understood him’.

The queue shunted forward and she saw the press corps and the BBC vans and Sky and all the rest of them. She had known they would be here, of course; Olivia had pulled a pretty spectacular stunt yesterday. This interested her. Why that, why now? She pulled down the visor to check herself in the mirror. One day she’d probably be rumbled as the doctor, a woman no less, who treated Olivia. It could be today and she didn’t want to look anything less than professional.

She watched a couple of cars do the aggressive leave-the-queue manoeuvre. They were always men, throwing their hunks of metal around self-importantly and holding everyone up, as if they all didn’t have places to go, things they had to do. Any other route was much longer and they already knew that; they just liked to temporarily hog two lanes of traffic. She knew she shouldn’t generalise about the sexes, but as she got older she was thinking more and more that clichés existed because they were true.

The first man roared away. The next car to come past was Darren’s. He had the window down on an old blue hatchback and his tanned arm on the window ledge, a thin band of hippy string round the tattoos on his wrist. He was a strange one, Darren – bent and haunted, yet surprisingly articulate and with a strength of character. The way he’d handled her in the chaos post-Linda had been masterful, in fact. She wondered idly how long he’d stay here; the cleaning staff were always moving on to other, usually also low-paid jobs. Not long, she reasoned, as he seemed to be shirking his shift on this hot day. Probably getting out of town and going to the beach to get high. She realised she didn’t know what people his age actually did – she’d read somewhere that they no longer drank. Could that be true? That they didn’t get plastered? They had no money, she knew, and according to the press were all living with their parents, wanking to online porn twenty-four hours a day, piercings everywhere. His abs would be rock-hard. A pleasing change from Joel’s middle-aged sag.

She watched the news crews do their thing. The hang ’em flog ’em brigade would be frothing over this latest development. One of the bodies recovered, one family with closure at last. Oh how she would love to be on a talk show, pitted against Orin Bukowski, and run his arguments into the ground! They would never understand her job and how valuable it was, what amazing results could be achieved. Helen felt her bitterness recede. God she loved her job. It had been the great revelation of her life, that she enjoyed work as much as she did, especially now that Joel had done the dirty and left.

It was a bloody outrage that he could pull a woman so young, a woman who by rights should be with someone Darren’s age. Women accepted such low standards while subjecting themselves to such high ones. It was always men foghorning their bad breath at you while they pontificated about something every woman in the room already knew.

Helen was at the gates now and pulled in past the press chaos. Work was her saviour, work was what brought self-respect and economic power. She thought of Becky, her sister, mired in faux complaints about her kids and her husband. Becks needed to get up off the sofa, duck the coffee mornings and get to work.

Helen was angry, that was why she was sweating, she knew. She’d been angry for days, weeks, maybe even years. Becky was coming on a sympathy visit at the weekend with the girls. They were going to make her feel better by baking cupcakes. Her world had fallen apart and cupcakes were supposed to mend it. Those sickly-sweet portions of goo in paper with horrible icing made her more angry than her husband’s infidelity. It was aiming so low that angered Helen. Why couldn’t her nieces cook paella, won tons, spicy prawns, cheese fucking straws?
Jesus, women,
she thought,
rise up against the tyranny of the candy-coloured cupcake!
Joel’s researcher probably liked cupcakes. Then again, considering the size of the knickers she’d found crushed between the mattress and their sleigh bed – which was what had precipitated this crisis – the girl was probably just throwing them back up down the pan, the barely digested contents of her stomach still pink as they splattered the sides of the bowl.

Helen had been entrusted with important work by the state, and she was doing that work well. Her professional success trumped her tawdry domestic mess. She swung round the car park, trying to find two spaces together so she could pull in easily. She began to sweat again at the thought of all those journalists watching her bad parking. She cranked the gears tensely, the anger swarming in her again. Going into the tight space facing forward had been a mistake, she realised, and her angles were all wrong. Fuck it, she thought, as she gave up trying to straighten the car and climbed out of the passenger seat, she wasn’t going to be hard on herself. No one was perfect. Least of all Joel.

S
onny breathed in and out again, counting a one-minute in-breath and trying for an out-breath of a minute and a half. He prided himself on being able to sit still for hours, retreat into his own mind, watch the images on the screen flowing by. In another life Sonny felt that he would like to have been a yogi on an Indian hillside, wearing white baggy clothes, the faint thrum of drums in the distance.

But today Corey was ruining his bliss, insisting on having talk radio on, everyone getting heated about what Olivia had revealed. ‘It’s cause and effect,’ Corey was saying. ‘She killed Linda and then the guilt made her give up one of the girls. Saying that, I’m glad she did that to Linda, the girl’s more important than her.’

‘What you saying?’ Sonny countered. ‘You don’t want anyone to die, surely. Duvall only using the girl to get out of solitary for what she did.’

‘Well, since no one here telling us a damn thing about what’s happening, we can only speculate.’

‘You see that chaos on the front gate this morning? That kind of thing upsets everybody.’

‘True dat,’ Corey replied. They paused to watch Dr Vivek Chowdray drive his Volvo through the gates and park. ‘We’re powerless, know what I’m sayin’,’ Corey added.

‘Yet we have to see it!’ They had both watched the attack on Linda on the cameras.

‘Him, people like the governor, Helen, they all got the inside track. Think of Darren, man, she could have killed him!’

‘A terrible thing.’ Sonny shook his head. He was only two years away from retirement and he craved the quiet, regular life.

‘We can take some of that power back, you know,’ Corey said. ‘With those.’ He tapped one of the screens in front of them.

‘How’s that?’ asked Sonny.

‘See Vivek there? We can find out where he lives by his licence plate.’

‘Or we could simply go up to him and ask him. Sometimes the old-fashioned ways are the best.’

Corey tapped the side of his head, as if Sonny were an idiot. ‘Where’s the fun in that? I have a cuz at the DVLA. You just give him the plate, and they can tell you all sorts of things – what other cars are registered at his address, where he lives, how long he’s been there.’

Sonny was nonplussed. ‘You been drinking the Kool-Aid. Why we need to know that?’

‘It’s the information age, yeah? James Bond or the CIA.’

Sonny gave Corey a long look. ‘Let me repeat. You’re like James Bond?’ Sonny burst out laughing as Corey tried to backtrack. ‘Bwoy, that’s the funniest thing you ever say. James Bond.’

Corey got indignant. ‘Maybe he’s having an affair. It’s always them quiet ones.’

‘Like Darren.’ Sonny thought of his lanky body and hunched shoulders. ‘He’s nice enough. It’s a tough break when you just trying to earn a crust.’

Corey didn’t look like he agreed. ‘The man tougher than he look with that hair – don’t be fooled by him. You can scoff, but when I find some juice, you gonna wanna hear it. You gonna pay to hear it!’ Corey stopped talking to watch Helen arrive. ‘Oh man, here we go.’

They both watched Helen try to drive into the tight space bonnet-first. Her angle was all wrong and she was in danger of clipping the brake light of the car one along. She reversed in a movement that looked angry even from this far away and tried to come in again. She ended up abandoning her car half in the space and clambering out of the passenger side.

‘Man, that woman can’t drive for shit,’ Corey said.

Sonny watched Helen get out of the car, looking harassed, scraping her hair back off her face and dismissively beeping the door locked as she walked away. He wanted to give her some driving tips, explain how you reversed in, lined up rear lights and edges and then it was all smooth and easy, but he worried she would label him sexist and not take his advice in the manner in which he gave it. He couldn’t imagine how she parallel-parked. He hoped she was rich enough to afford a drive outside her house. Then again, with her separation, that was unlikely.

‘I can find out about Helen—’