The Silent Ones (22 page)

The woman grimaced. ‘They just want your personal information nowadays.’

‘So true. John, isn’t it? I had a chat with him a few weeks back when I came in. Has he recently moved in? If you’ve just moved it’s much worse I’ve heard.’

‘Oh, John’s been here years.’ She settled back in her seat and, just as Darren had hoped, looked ready for a long conversation. ‘When I first started the shop was—’

‘What are you doing?’ One of the dark-haired women was right behind Darren.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Why are you asking about John?’ Darren could see the women were sisters or twins. They were English, with flat south London accents. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘I’m not asking about anything—’

The woman took a step towards him. ‘Don’t play dumb with us. Who’s asking?’ The other woman shut the door to the shop and flicked the Yale lock closed. The black woman pushed her chair back against the wall, watching.

‘No one, I’m not asking anything.’

There was a very tense silence. ‘You won’t talk? I know who can make you.’ The woman closest to him turned towards the door that John had disappeared through and Darren lunged for the exit.

One of the sisters screamed out John’s name and Darren could hear heavy footsteps thundering down the stairs above his head. He grabbed at the shop door, twisting the Yale lock. The other woman tried to pull him back from the door. ‘Who are you?’ she shouted. ‘You won’t get away with it!’

Darren had to turn and shove her hard to get her off him so he could open the door. She stumbled backwards into a rack of clothes, which began to roll away from her, leaving her in a tumble of hangers and shirts on the floor.

The door to the flat at the back flew open and John Sears or de Luca came through it. Darren finally got through the front door and sprinted away down the street. He didn’t stop running until he was nearly in Stockwell, when he realised he was still carrying the bag with the T-shirt in it. He was about to throw it away when he actually took a look at what he had purchased. It was a black T-shirt with a picture of a man smoking a massive reefer.

He waited an hour before he dared circle back to the Common and collect his bike. His pulse was still racing as he unlocked his chain. What had Orin called befrienders?
They are a security breach of the first order
. Who was this man, why had he changed his name and why were those women – his sisters, surely – so protective of him? He was still no nearer to an answer when he had cycled back to Streatham and bought the equipment he needed to start decorating the house.

I
n the morning Darren and his dad took his mum to St George’s. Darren stood by the car as his mum got ready, watching Dad pick the smashed bodies of gnats off the car paintwork. Mum was always last out of the house, needing to check the door and windows were locked. A text beeped on her phone – a ‘thinking of you’ message from a friend, no doubt.

Darren picked up her hospital bag and put it in the boot of the car. He got in the back seat. Even now he was an adult, his position relative to his parents in the car hadn’t changed. Dad drove carefully, leaving Darren to wonder if he was already over the limit for drink-driving.

At the hospital they watched Mum have her IV fitted and the nurses did a lot of kindly patting of forearms and making of light jokes designed to put the men at ease. Melanie would be in surgery for three hours and recuperating afterwards for a few days. She was wheeled away and the Evans men were left alone with their demons.

Dad told Darren to go home; he would wait in the hospital until she woke up.

Darren did what his dad wanted. He went home and decided to start on the front of the house. He was still badly shaken by what had happened in Clapham in the charity shop. The women were aggressive and protective, but what it all meant he couldn’t fathom. He had to stay busy to stay on top of his panic about so many things: the threat of discovery at Roehampton, the fact that his face would be clearly visible on the security camera in the charity shop – and the darker fears, the horror of what had happened to Molly and what might have happened to Carly.

Darren planned his DIY in detail. He opened up his new cordless paint-stripper gun and plugged it in to charge. He dragged the ladder from the shed to the front of the house. He got his phone out and got some tracks playing. He took out a new scraper and stood back, examining the scale of the job. It looked big. He rolled a joint. The sun was hot and pleasant. He had a cup of tea.

He played around for a bit with the paint-stripper gun; it made a pleasing noise, like a jet engine passing overhead. He climbed the ladder and applied the jet of heat to the cracked and peeling paint. It began to come away in strips, falling to the paving below him. He used the scraper to get into the grooves between the splits of wood. He climbed down the ladder and moved it along a few inches. He became distracted by a beetle crawling across the paving slabs between the bubbled paint remains. He climbed the ladder again and pulled away more peeling paint.

He started to sweat. He got the munchies. He went back into the house and rummaged through a variety of cupboards for biscuits or cereal or chocolate, knocking over packets and leaving boxes on the table.

He smoked the joint.

By the time he texted Chloe to ask if he could come over he had been working on the house for three hours and had stripped a door-sized section back to the bare wood. He felt ridiculously pleased with himself. Dad phoned to say Mum was out of the operation and in recovery; it had gone as well as could be expected.

He had another joint.

He arranged to visit Chloe after he’d seen his mum.

He picked up his tools and took them into the kitchen, leaving them on the kitchen table. He didn’t notice he’d tramped hundreds of flakes of burnt paint into the house. He tried to carry his bike through the house from the garden and tripped over the paint gun charger that was plugged in in the hall. He yanked the plug out of the wall and took the charger in to the kitchen. He began to pack a bag in case he stayed at Chloe’s house later, then changed his mind; he needed to be with his dad.

He got confused. He remembered to put the joint in the bin, but put the stripper gun in his rucksack. He couldn’t find his phone. He put his bike keys in his back pocket and the stripper in the kitchen drawer. He locked the house and cycled away, leaving the ladder propped up against the front of the house.

Mum looked so small and vulnerable in the hospital bed after her mastectomy that Darren stopped short and his eyes filled with tears. A nurse was moving about beside her, and she reassured him and Dad that she was OK.

They sat together for an hour and then Mum said she was tired and needed to sleep.

‘Mum, I’m going to Chloe’s house now,’ Darren said.

He saw her give Dad a look. ‘Who’s Chloe?’

He shrugged. ‘Just someone I met at work.’

She grinned. ‘When do I get to meet this someone?’

He shrugged again. ‘Someday.’

‘Don’t wait too long, my days might be numbered.’

He left to the sound of Andy shushing her and urging her to stay positive.

‘I like your T-shirt,’ Chloe said.

‘Yeah, it’s kinda cool.’

Darren was wearing the T-shirt he’d bought from the charity shop as he lay on Chloe’s sofa. He was trying to get up but Chloe kept pulling him back down.

‘I tried to friend you on Facebook, but I couldn’t find you.’

He froze. Here was yet another problem he hadn’t thought through.

‘I don’t do social media.’

‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘Didn’t you say in Devon that you did?’

He panicked. Trying to remember what he had and hadn’t said to her was proving impossible. He was not naturally a liar and he hated doing it. He needed to never go back to Roehampton, come clean with Chloe and move on with his life.

‘I’ve been thinking a lot about Duvall,’ Darren said. ‘How easy is it to keep a secret, do you think? I mean, if you did something really bad, like Olivia has done, could you never tell anyone?’

Chloe lay back on the sofa and thought about it for a while. ‘I could keep a secret for ever. Easily.’ He fancied she was staring right through him.

‘Really? I’m surprised.’

‘Yeah. If it was important enough. And it seems to be very important to Olivia to keep the secret about where those girls are.’

‘So why did she reveal where Molly was?’

Chloe sighed. ‘I don’t know. Some at work are saying that she did it to get less time in solitary for killing Linda, but I don’t think it’s that. It’s about power. Power over something we don’t understand and maybe never will.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Or maybe it’s all about you, Darren Smith.’ She smiled and ran a finger down his nose. ‘Maybe it’s all about you.’

O
lly felt cold, his skinny nine-year-old shoulders shivering, even in June. It felt like a gale was blowing off the North Sea. The water had merged with the sky, one massive slab of grey with just the bobbing boats to cut the monotony.

He scratched the wall with his fingernail, wore it down till it hurt the end of his finger. Beggs would be along in a minute, a football under his feet, and they would go and hoof it about on the playing fields. Beggs didn’t understand why Olly liked to lean here and watch the boats, why he liked being alone. The harbour held riggers and outboard motors and grappling poles and lobster pots, and he just liked the colours of the boats, liked the way they bobbed and swung and moved in the water. He never told anybody this; Nan would call him a poof from her armchair before taking another drag on her Richmonds, and being called that was the worst thing in the world. So he watched the boats alone.

Fishermen, the blasted race, Nan called them. Most were solitary, or it was a family affair, dads and sons, coming back with their small catches and half-full nets. He didn’t have a dad, otherwise maybe it would be him out on the water. Olly didn’t know anyone here who actually ate fish; there was nothing a fisherman liked more than sausage or onion rings as far as Olly could tell. Neither of which came from the sea, Nan would have said, grinning at him.

The red boat was the one he liked the best. Most of the time it was sealed in its green tarpaulin, the sides running with rust. It was a largish boat, with a top of the range outboard and a roomy cabin. The owner didn’t come very often. The harbour master had told him once that he was called Gert Becker. Olly had remembered the name because it sounded foreign and because he was rich. Of that Olly had no doubt. He always parked his dark green, late model hatchback behind the Spar, as close as he could get to the boats. Gert Becker liked rolls of tarpaulin. Brought one with him each time he came.

Olly liked watching boats and building shelters, and he liked building them with tarpaulin. It sounded like a sail when the wind blew, made a loud noise when the rains came, made him dream of adventure, and he liked its bright, cheerful colours: blue and green and white, the colour of the sea in the sun.

There was no sun today though. He watched Gert, dressed in the yellow plastic of the fisherman, chug out of the harbour in his red boat and out to the open sea in the drizzle. The guy was strange, but then that was no dealbreaker for Olly. Most people were strange and best left well alone. He had all the gear and no idea, as Nan would say, money to spend but his catches were no better than anyone else’s. Olly had climbed aboard the red boat once when no one was around and seen the man’s folly first hand: he had weights for the deep sea on the boat, but any local person could have told him that vessel didn’t have the range to go out there.

And tarpaulin was expensive, and even though this guy had a lot of money, no one in the harbour ever wasted anything if they could help it, Nan said, and this guy never came back with his. The roll was always gone when he returned. Profligate, Nan would have said, if he had ever told her.

Beggs was late, as usual. The tide was already past the old black post that stuck up by the sea wall. Soon the water would turn and retreat, taking with it the secrets the sea never gave back. Olly licked his finger where a tiny line of blood had begun to show at the edge of his ragged nail. He turned and saw Beggs dribbling the ball along the windswept harbour road. He joined him and they ran and dribbled the ball away from the shore up the road to the field.

There was a woman standing on the other side of the road, going neither this way nor that, her blonde hair streaming outwards with the wind. She was watching him. She was so still, thin and unbending in the wind. For a moment he thought she was a ghost. He got over it and thought, another weirdo. He couldn’t imagine how many there must be in Lowestoft if there were this many here.

He had an image of the seabed covered with rolls of tarpaulin, a vast dump no one ever visited, but then he saw the white crossbar of the goalpost and he raced Beggs towards it, the wind on their backs and squeals coming out of their mouths. When he turned round, the woman had vanished.

O
livia heard them before she saw them, the governor’s hard soles clicking on the floor outside her cell. There was also the muffled chaos of lesser mortals scraping and bowing.

The door opened and they crowded in: the governor, Helen, Dr Chowdray, two guards and a third who worked the cell block. The governor was a dandy from head to toe, his tie good and bright, his suit designer.

‘You ready, Olivia?’ the governor asked.

‘I’m ready.’

The dandy nodded. ‘It’ll be over soon. And then you’ll feel much better.’

She held out her arms and spread her legs and the guard called Tracey frisked her thoroughly, soft hands running over her contours. She could smell her perfume on her hands and one of the other guards, Alan, a lover of pies and ale, handcuffed her wrists together. Tracey began a check of her toilet bag. Olivia watched her carefully. She was thorough: feeling the toothpaste tube, even the crimped metal end, shaking the face cream for a giveaway metallic rattle, breaking the soap into small chunks. She ran her fingers over the seams in the bag, checked the zip.