Watching You (29 page)

W
aking before dawn, Marnie puts on the same clothes and opens the curtains. The sky beyond the ridge is beginning to brighten and the stars are fading. She goes to the kitchen and hears an axe thudding into wood. Owen is up and working. When does he sleep?

Marnie checks the back door. Unlocked. Quickly, she wakes Elijah, experiencing an odd sense of déjà vu—a fleeting memory of being woken and bundled into clothes. She pulls up Elijah’s trousers and ties his laces, tucking in his shirt, straightening his fringe.

“I’m hungry.”

“We’re going to eat later,” she whispers. “First we’re going on an adventure.”

“Where?”

“Away. You have to be very brave.”

Marnie strips a pillowcase from the bed and fills it with a sweater and socks. She goes to her bedroom and looks for something sturdy to wear on her feet. Yesterday she noticed a pair of heavy work boots in her wardrobe.

The axe is still falling outside. She can hear Owen whistling as he drops logs into the wheelbarrow. Opening the back door, she checks the porch and slides along the wall until she reaches the edge of the house. Peering around the corner she can see the garden and half the barn, but not the woodpile or Owen.

She goes back to Elijah. “When I tell you, we’re going to run really fast.”

“Like a race?”

“That’s right, but you’re going to hold onto Mummy’s hand and be very quiet.”

Marnie ties a knot in the top of the pillowcase. She opens the kitchen door. Once they’re on the grass, she starts to run, skirting the side of the house and heading down the slope, half dragging and half carrying Elijah. Marnie isn’t conscious of her legs carrying her, or her feet striking the ground. It’s too dark to make out the hollows and mounds, which make her stumble and almost fall.

She doesn’t look back. Elijah is asking her to slow down. It’s two hundred meters to the nearest grove of trees. She stops. Breathing hard.

“You hurt me, Mummy.”

“I’m sorry, but we have to keep moving.”

The sound of an engine makes Marnie turn her head. Not a car. She glances up the slope toward the house and the barn. A single headlight emerges from the barn. The motorbike leaps over the mounds and potholes, the engine roaring.

Marnie is up and running again. Her field of vision is like a shaky hand-held camera with the image lurching back and forth. They come to a cattle grid where parallel metal bars cover a trench to stop cows moving between fields. Marnie makes her way across, balancing on the narrow bars. Elijah slips and his leg wedges between them. Marnie tries to lift him. He cries out. She reaches through the tubes and turns his foot, pushing as well as pulling.

The motorbike is getting nearer.

It won’t move. She undoes the laces and slips off his trainer. His foot slips free. She carries him to the side of the track and they slide down an embankment. The motorbike swings around the nearest corner and rattles across the cattle grid. It stops. The front wheel pivots from side to side, as Owen uses the headlight to scan the trees. Marnie is lying on top of Elijah with her hand over his mouth, her mouth to his ear, hushing him. The engine dies. She holds her breath. The beam of light swings back and forth over her head. Seconds tick by. The engine starts again and she listens as it rumbles away.

Marnie rolls onto her back, hearing the soft gasping of the breeze in the trees…and water. The stream must be nearby. It triggers another memory: an early morning just like this one, with the same emotions, the same thudding heart, running. Elijah whimpers. She lifts him onto her lap. He clings to her like a baby marsupial looking for a pouch to crawl into. Cradling his head, she rocks him from side to side, humming a song. The tune sparks another recollection and she pictures a child sitting in the front parlor of the farmhouse. The wheels on the bus went round and round. The people on the bus stood up and sat down…

Her mother was pregnant. Struggling with the weight of it. Her father was away working. They heard a motorbike engine coming up the track, getting closer. Marnie ran onto the front veranda. A man climbed off the bike. Holding his hat. Wearing a uniform. Her mother walked across the lawn to the gate. She talked to the man, told him to leave, but he didn’t seem to be listening. Instead he came into the house and sat at the kitchen table, too big for the room, his legs stretching out, his boots leaving marks on the linoleum.

He wanted to dance. Marnie’s mother said no. He forced her up and they moved around the kitchen, bumping into furniture. Every so often, the man looked over her shoulder and stared at Marnie.

The man stayed for supper. He slept on her daddy’s side of the bed. During the night her mother woke Marnie and made her put on her dressing gown and slippers before they tiptoed through the house, out the door trying not to make a sound. They went to the barn. Marnie’s mother strapped her in the car seat.

The car wouldn’t start first time. She tried again and again. A light came on in the house. The soldier came out and chased them down the driveway, wearing his singlet and dungarees.

It was still dark. They couldn’t travel quickly on the track. They had to slow down at the cattle grid and to cross the stream. She heard the motorbike engine and saw the single headlight reflecting from the rear-view mirror, lighting up her mother’s eyes.

There was a bang and the car shuddered. It left the road and crashed through a wall of brown reeds at the edge of a stream. The first tree ripped off the driver’s door. The second tree spun the car in the opposite direction, scooping water through the open window and spewing mud onto the windscreen. Marnie didn’t see what happened to her mother. She wasn’t behind the wheel when the car came to a stop, axle-deep in water, sinking at the front. The engine cooled with a series of pings and knocks.

The soldier waded into the stream and unbuckled Marnie from her seat. Water swirled around his thighs as he lifted her onto his back and carried her to dry land.

Marnie’s mother was lying broken in the reeds, sticky with blood and glass. She moaned and her legs spread automatically and she tried to push, gritting her teeth. Her eyes opened and fear lived in them like an animal caught in a trap.

“Help me,” she whispered.

He licked his palms and smoothed his hair. He walked away.

Marnie can see the scene behind her closed lids as clearly as if she had taken a photograph or recorded it on film: her mother moaning, her back arching, the baby coming…not moving.

There is a sound on the track above her. Owen is on foot now, carrying a torch, looking for their footprints. The sky has grown brighter as the light gathers behind Marnie. Her blouse is soaked in sweat and the breeze has found a way through the fabric to make her shiver.

Elijah has stopped crying, but his breathing is shallow. He’s not strong enough for this. She should have stayed at the farmhouse; found another way.

“I know you’re there, Marnie,” shouts Owen. “I can see your footprints.”

He waits.

“I found Elijah’s shoe. It’s time to come home.”

Marnie stands and steps out from behind the tree, holding Elijah. Her legs wobble for a moment. Owen slips down the bank and takes Elijah from her. He slides a plank of timber over the cattle grid to help them cross. Marnie follows him up the track to the farmhouse, where he unlaces her muddy shoes.

“Porridge for breakfast,” he says. “Warm you up.”

Z
oe has spent all morning at the police station going over CCTV footage. After the first hour the images began to blur into each other until she doubted whether she could recognize herself if she appeared on the screen. Rhonda Firth has been keeping her primed with giant cups of cola and crushed iced that give her an ice-cream headache if she drinks them too quickly.

The past twenty-four hours have been full of phantoms for Zoe. Last night she woke with a scream caught in her throat and a man leaning over her bed with bloody stumps instead of hands. The shadows were only shadows, she told herself, but she didn’t sleep again. She sat by the window in the attic room and wondered whether her mother was looking out at the same rain that beat on the leaves and dripped from the wires and gurgled in the pipes.

Now she’s sitting outside Gennia’s office, waiting to go home. Where is home? She misses her mother and Elijah. She misses Daniel. If he were here, he’d know what to do.

Later, on the drive to Ruiz’s place, Zoe stares out the car window, watching London in the rain. She’s sick of people telling her how brave she is and how everything is going to be all right.

At the house Ruiz makes her a coffee with a machine that makes diarrheal noises. Zoe wants to ask him about his missing ring finger and why he limps, but that would mean engaging in a conversation, which might require her answering questions. She opts instead for silence.

Ruiz brings her the coffee. It’s too milky.

“Have you eaten?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I can make you something. How about a sandwich?”

She looks at him.
Which bit didn’t he understand?

He opens the fridge. “I don’t have any bread…or cheese.” He’s silent for a moment. “I’ll go out and pick up a few things. Do you want to come?”

“No.”

“Will you be OK by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Anything in particular you want?”

“No.”

“Answer the phone if it rings?”

“OK.”

She hears the front door close and opens her laptop. It finds the wireless signal and opens on the Facebook page that she set up for Daniel. She glances down the list of recent comments, answering some of them or pressing the “like” button.

A dialogue box pops open in the lower right corner of her screen.

There is picture of a cartoon character next to the message—a squirrel with a mask over its eyes.

Zoe types a reply:

Only Daniel ever called her “Dimples.” She types:

Zoe stares at the screen, reading the message twice, wanting so much to believe. She types a reply:

Zoe feels her heart thumping in her chest. She types another question:

Zoe keeps typing, trying to convince him:

T
he police car pulls up outside a row of terraces in a run-down area of central Manchester. A group of black teenagers are milling around the corner shop as though guarding the neighborhood. Smoking. Stopping cars. Talking to girls. The journey from London has taken over three hours under siren, weaving between traffic and semi-trailers that traveled in convoys with all the obstinacy and application of freight trains.

DI Gennia finishes a phone call and climbs from the patrol car. He brushes lint from his shoulders and puts on his hat, adjusting the brim. Joe O’Loughlin joins him on the footpath, glancing at a small neat terrace where someone has cared enough to plant flowerboxes and clean the flagstone step.

“Francis Moffatt worked for the local health authority for thirty years, mainly in child protection,” says Gennia. “He left the job eight years ago. Since then he’s been driving trucks for a courier company. This is his mother’s house—his only listed address.”

He rings the doorbell. After a long wait an old woman answers, opening the door a crack.

“My gas and electricity are fine. I don’t want a new plan.”

Gennia flashes his badge. “We’re looking for Francis.”

Her eyes light for a moment and her demeanor changes. “Is everything all right? He’s a good boy. He looks after me.”

She opens the door wider. Dressed in a floral print dress, boots, and a sagging cardigan, she looks as if she’s been pickled in vinegar like a small brown onion and topped with the sort of blue-rinse hairstyle they issue women with every pension card.

“Did he get a speeding ticket? I’ve told him not to drive so fast.”

“Is he at home?” asks Gennia.

“He’s sleeping. He works nights.”

The detective pushes past her. “You’d better wake him.”

Mrs. Moffatt leads them along a darkened hallway to the kitchen where she shoos an overweight corgi from beneath the table. The dog waddles over to Joe and sniffs his shoes. She puts the kettle on and goes to wake her son.

There are photographs on a mantelpiece above an old stove and more in the drawing room, which is full of big, dark, vague furniture. The images are in tarnished silver frames and show several children and grandchildren, scattered now.

Mrs. Moffatt reappears. “He’s getting dressed.” A toilet flushes from along the hallway.

She potters, taking out cups and putting milk in a small white jug. The kitchen smells of overripe fruit and the lone window is so dirty it gives the impression the house is completely submerged in water.

Floorboards creak. Francis Moffatt appears, a thin, dour man with a close-clipped white beard and an ugly scar beneath his left eye. His hair is receding at the front and long at the back, dragged into a graying ponytail. He takes a chair at the table, scratching his stomach through an unbuttoned shirt.

“This better be important, I didn’t get home until five this morning.”

“When did you last see Marnella Logan?” asks Gennia.

Francis frowns. He has false teeth, which he pushes forward with his tongue and then sucks back in again. “Why?”

“Answer the question.”

Francis sneaks a glance at Joe. “Until last year, I hadn’t heard her name in almost twenty years. Her husband came to see me.”

“Daniel Hyland?”

“Yeah. He wanted to know about her childhood. I couldn’t really help him. Mostly I dealt with her folks.”

“Meaning?”

“They were foster carers. They had a farm in West Yorkshire, about twenty miles from here. I used to place kids with them. Marnie was their only child. Started off being a real sweet kid, but then she sort of lost her way.”

Joe leans forward, wanting more. Francis shifts uneasily on his chair. He doesn’t like the way the psychologist is staring at him, as though suddenly his mask has been pulled aside and his true character exposed, revealed in every wrinkle and tic.

The kettle has boiled. A thread of steam rises from the spout. Mrs. Moffatt adds seething water to the leaves, jamming a lid on the pot. Everybody seems to respect the ceremony, waiting until the tea is poured, the pot raised and lowered, dark brown liquid filling each cup. Milk. Sugar.

Joe is still waiting. Francis raises a cup to his lips, taking a cautious sip.

“When Marnie was eight she stole her father’s car and crashed it into a bus shelter, injuring two people. Her father had taught her to drive on the farm, but she could barely see over the wheel. She drove nearly all the way to Manchester. The police called Child Protection. I had to prepare a report for the MSCB. I interviewed Marnie and arranged for her to see a child psychologist. I also spoke to her father and stepmother. They were good people.”

“How many foster kids did you place with the Logans?”

“Christ, I can’t remember. There were dozens of them.”

“Any of them develop an unhealthy interest in Marnie?”

The former social worker picks up on the sub-text. “Has something happened to her?”

“She and her little boy are missing. We believe they may have been abducted.”

“And you think it’s one of the foster kids?”

“We’re investigating that possibility.”

Francis looks at them skeptically. “That was a long time ago.”

“Did any of them cause you concern?”

He smiles wryly. “Every last one of them.”

“Meaning?”

“These were kids who’d been abused, orphaned, abandoned, or cut adrift. Some went back to their real families. A few were adopted. Others were in and out of care until they turned eighteen and were in and out of prison after that. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not writing them all off. Some turned out OK.” He looks at Joe and Gennia, opening his palms as though stating the obvious. “Marnie had more problems than most of them and she came from a loving family.”

“How well did you know her?” asks Joe.

“She was jealous of the foster kids—that can happen sometimes, particularly with an only child. She lost her mum and struggled after that. I remember the first Mrs. Logan. I met her before Marnie was born.”

“Why?”

“They were living in Manchester back then. Mr. Logan called social services because he caught a kid hiding in his basement spying on his wife. I knew the boy. He was one of my cases. His mother had convictions for prostitution, drug possession, neglect…”

Joe sits up straighter. His tea has been forgotten.

“Tell me about this boy.”

“I’d known him since he was a wee sprog. Once or twice a week we’d pick him up from the cinema where his mum dumped him because she couldn’t afford childcare. Owen didn’t watch the films. He preferred looking at the audience. He’d hide beneath the screen and just watch them.”

“How do you know?” asks Joe.

“That’s what Owen told me. He was always a bit odd. Quiet. Unemotional. He preferred to sleep under beds than in them. He could climb a wall with his bare feet like he was Spiderman, wedging himself into a corner of the ceiling; and you’d come into a room and not realize he was up there. Scare the bejesus out of you.” Moffatt scratches at his navel and examines his forefinger. “Once or twice he got caught peering through people’s windows. He got a slap on the wrist, but I don’t think he stopped. He just got better at hiding. I’ve never seen a kid who could be so quiet. He simply faded into the background, you know, like he was one of those lizards that change color.” He clicks his fingers.

“A chameleon,” says Gennia.

“Yeah, one of them.”

“What happened to Owen?” asks Joe.

“Every time we put him into care, his mother would clean up her act and get him back again. Went on for years.”

“When did you last see him?”

Moffatt blows air out of his cheeks. “When Mr. Logan caught Owen in the basement he wanted him charged with trespassing. The police called me because I was Owen’s caseworker. He must have been sixteen ’cos he joined the army soon after that. I don’t know what happened to Martha.”

“Martha?”

“His mum.”

Gennia has the teacup to his lips as though he’s forgotten to sip. “What was Martha’s last name?”

“Cargill.”