A Cry in the Night (27 page)

‘I’m fed up being told how much I can drink, how loud I can laugh,’ Helen said. ‘I just want to turn my back on all of that. Stick close to friends who don’t care about the bits of me that are fucked up, because they’re fucked up too.’

‘And who are these special friends?’ Zoe asked.

Helen caught Lizzy’s eye and smiled.

‘I guess I have friends in interesting places.’

Interesting places. Zoe could imagine knowing looks all over the city. It felt like she was collecting them.

‘I think you would be an interesting friend to have too, Zoe. And I think you would benefit from the friends I have.’

Zoe didn’t need to be alone. But she also knew there would be a price.

You don’t have to agree to anything yet, she told herself. Just find out the cost. You don’t have to hurt Sam. You don’t have to do anything wrong. Not yet. Just find out more.

Helen sat patiently opposite her.

‘What do you want me to do?’ Zoe finally asked.

*

She frowned as she remembered the conversation, and worried about why Sam, sitting so sadly next to her, had asked about Helen.

‘I guess she’s probably pretty great at her job,’ she replied, tucking her hands under thighs as she spoke. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I hate her,’ Sam said.

‘What’s happened?’ she asked, alarmed, but he said no more. They felt so far apart. It was as though she’d been ‘repositioned’ somehow so that Helen was more clearly in focus and it was Sam who was blurred and hard to trust.

‘She’s dangerous,’ he said. She watched his hands twist and his mouth word silent curses. It reminded her of the bad times when he’d appear at her door, drunk and morose, his eyes red with tears, howling his wife’s name. She had thought those days were over.

All around them, nurses and doctors marched by with their duties. A patient on a stretcher was wheeled past and Zoe saw a loose hand flop to the side as it went by. A tannoy announced something inaudible.

She left him to stay with Jenny overnight at the hospital and promised to check in on Issy at the house. Sam had rambled on about not trusting the nanny, and she was grateful that he was making it easier for her. She got to his house in the middle of the night, used the key he’d given her and stepped inside without making a sound.

Issy was asleep in her bed, her long hair dragged over her face. Zoe watched her for a moment, remembering days gone by when she would babysit for Sam and Andrea. She used to do ‘nail sessions’ with their daughters and enjoyed the girliness of her time with them. It seemed so long ago now. Work had dragged her into darker places. She looked around the room, the same way she did wherever she went now – checking, clocking, noting – and then slipped out, glad to be able to tell Sam that she’d checked up on Issy and all was fine.

But that wasn’t really why she was here.

She trawled the house, past discarded clothes, tennis rackets and stinky trainers, wondering where Sam would keep the files. Eventually she ended up in his bedroom. The sight stopped her dead.

It wasn’t just the papers that were littered all over the floor. Nor was it the heavy scrawls and frantic circles that Sam had drawn on each and every one. It was the collection of photographs – police mugshots – of the women who were laid so neatly on the pillows that made her queasy. Maybe there was some sense in the way Sam saw it all, the way some people know just where things are in piles of junked paperwork. But Zoe knew that Sam was an orderly man, and this was not the way he usually worked.

She didn’t touch a thing. She stepped gently amongst the papers and took in every detail. Women, murdering children, connected somehow to water. She remembered the way that the news reports and newspapers had wailed at the dangers of women at the time. And she thought about Helen’s words. In this room, they made perfect sense.

It was later when she realised that all of the papers formed a circle and that the effect was rather like a spider’s web. And at the centre of all of this was another photo. And the face that smiled serenely up from the bed was Helen Seymour.

Zoe didn’t move for quite some time. She knew that the next decisions she made would change everything, irrevocably.

She didn’t move. She didn’t move for quite some time.

Sam returned home with Jenny early the next morning. She was pale and withdrawn, possibly ashamed, maybe just stubborn and angry. He couldn’t tell. They drove in silence. He wanted to say reassuring words, but they fell hopelessly into the footwells. Jenny sat still, her hands folded on her lap, her head bowed like a nun.

Eventually they parked up and he stopped her as she reached for the door.

‘Jenny, honey.’

She sat back, staring forward, waiting for the lecture.

‘I’m not angry,’ he said. ‘I’m just worried.’

She looked down, but that was as much as he got.

He stumbled on for a bit, made some bad jokes and eventually hated his voice as much as she clearly did. He let her go to her bedroom and change for school. She’d told him she wanted to go back and he’d been keen to show willing.

Tonight, he’d cook them a meal. He’d make a spaghetti carbonara, send Magda off to the pictures, he’d drag Mum downstairs and they could all have a laugh together. Jenny would be fine again. He’d solve this.

Issy was quiet too. He’d expected her to revel in Jenny’s villainy, but she just munched on her toast and the only gesture she made was a quick, tight grip around Jenny’s waist. She didn’t say anything and this short act of solidarity was all the more affecting for it. Sam felt further estranged from his girls. He drank a coffee, standing alone by the microwave, watching them eat. There was no noise beyond chewing and the miserable scraping of cutlery.

Magda came in. She stopped at the door and glanced at Sam, then at the girls. Issy looked up at her and smiled. Magda nodded then turned and left. Sam saw it all and clutched his mug that tiny bit tighter.

He found himself standing by the stairs as the girls grabbed their things and headed off. He had nothing to say as they trooped off down the road and was equally dumb when Magda turned on the Hoover, slowly pushing him towards the door. He wanted to stay, to show some command in his own home, but this was a battle whose rules he didn’t understand. He found himself shutting the door and wandering away without purpose.

He stood by the car, keys in his hand, dog-tired, his mind smudged, mistrustful of everyone and of his own cramping
emotions. He was about to drag himself back to the station and force himself through the mountainous paperwork that he’d been avoiding since the call to the Lake District, when something popped into his head. Something about the papers upstairs in his bedroom, his addiction to their detail. He hurried back, clocking the wariness with which Magda eyed him as he hurried up the stairs.

He shut the bedroom door and looked at the scattered papers. It only took a moment to realise what was wrong. A file had been moved. To a stranger, all the papers had been dumped in a haphazard disorder. But Sam knew where everything should be, and it was clear to him that the file which housed the details of the witness, Richard Howell, had been touched. It had been moved a few inches from where he had left it. Just a few inches, but Sam was sure of it. He grabbed the case folder and opened it up. Everything was still there, but he felt a little sick as he looked through the details – there, written down for the woman who had spied on him, was the address where Richard now lived.

Now they knew that he had visited Ricky. Helen would have been told.

Magda knocked on the door and he snapped his head around to face her. She saw the aggression and took a step back.

‘You want me to clean in here?’ she asked cautiously.

He waited for the tell to show that she’d already been in
here and didn’t need his permission at all. But her face gave nothing away.

‘Don’t ever come in here again. Got that?’

She turned tail and vanished. Sam looked back down at the file.

Helen knew about Ricky.

He ran out of the house and threw himself into the car.

*

He parked outside Ricky’s dingy apartment, ignoring the double yellow lines. He sprinted up the stairs, three at a time and hammered on the door. He banged and banged but no one came. He went to neighbours’ doors but got no reply. He felt as though they were all hiding from him. Eventually, he made a call to the station, explained that he believed a man’s life was in danger and asked to use the necessary protocol to break into the flat. Once permission was given, he kicked and kicked until the wood splintered and he could force himself in.

Sam made his way from room to room, the suspicion hardening to fact as he found each one bare. He stopped in the hallway after his search. Ricky was gone, clothes had been snatched from a chest of drawers, as had bed linen and the television. Once again, he’d been spirited away.

Helen’s network had done its job. Sam considered the legal powers he might have to be able to force the chambers
to reveal all of its correspondence, but he also felt that such a slow, bureaucratic method wouldn’t and couldn’t shackle a woman like Helen. And the result was always the same: silence.

She silenced the women and she silenced the witnesses. Whatever was going on, Helen was hell-bent on shutting it up. She got to these women and they never spoke again. Did she know them before they committed their vile crimes? Did she organise these too? Right now, Sam deemed her capable of anything.

*

He drove to her chambers. He wanted to face her again, wanted to stare her down and tell her that he knew what she was doing and that he was going to stop her. He didn’t care if she laughed in his face. He needed something beyond these constant doubts and fears. But when he reached her offices, he was politely told that she had left for business and wasn’t expected back for several days.

He imagined her driving Ricky away.

He went back to the station, entered his office, pulled down the blinds and sat uselessly at his desk.

They all fell silent. They killed the children and never spoke again. Every time. Every time, except for Sarah Downing. She continued to act normally. He remembered how she stared at him and swayed when he arrested her, and how cold and ‘other’ she seemed to him. It was as though
something took her over, as though she was nearly revealed to him. But then Helen had silenced her too.

She was free now, and walking among us. Looking like everyone else.

Why was she different? Because she was free? Free to do it again?

Sam thought of Helen again, driving a fretful Ricky away from the city. Far away to somewhere no one would find him. Sam imagined the move from those grotty streets to calmer, cleaner spaces. Open fields, blue skies.

Lullingdale Water swept back into his mind. The waves licked at his feet, the icy breeze bit at his face. Arthur Downing floated before him, just out of reach. And Lily spied on him from the edge of the woods.

Lily. All the other women fell silent once they’d completed their terrible deeds.

Maybe Sarah had been freed because her work wasn’t done yet.

And that would be because Lily was still alive.

Lily Downing was alive. Sarah would know where she was, would be waiting for the furore to calm down, and then she would finish what she started. Helen would tell her when. Maybe Helen wanted it done now. And she would have Ashley to help her.

The pieces crunched into place.

Sam hurried home. He packed for several days. He paused
when he thought of Jenny, and of the sly glances that Magda and Issy shared. But then Lily’s cries drowned out all of this.

Everything would be fine, but he needed to get up to the Lakes first.

Sam was dumping a bag into the boot of his car when Zoe found him. She seemed to appear from nowhere and made him jump.

‘Hey, boss. What’s up?’ Her voice was strangely cheerful. It felt a little fake.

‘Hi. You alright?’ He placed the last of his things into the boot and slammed it shut.

‘Never better. So what are you up to?’

The sun was setting already and the dull clouds made the day all the shorter.

‘Boss?’ she asked again.

‘Thought I might head back up to the Lakes.’

‘You got a hunch?’

‘Something like that, yeah.’

‘Cool! I’ll come with you.’

‘You’ll need to pack some clothes. I think I’ll be gone for a few days, at least.’

‘You know me,’ she said, holding up a small holdall. ‘Always prepared.’

He didn’t know what to say. She faced him confidently, then bashed him happily on the arm.

‘Come on then, let’s get going,’ she said. ‘Sooner we get there, sooner you can buy me a pint in the pub that time forgot.’

She skipped over to the passenger side and got into the car. He tried to think of a reason why she couldn’t come with him. There was something about her persistence and forced jollity that worried him.

It was Zoe, he reminded himself. It was Zoe and she had never let him down. But then darker thoughts crept up and sniggered at his softness.

He went back to the house and returned carrying his heavy boots. He threw them under the driver’s seat and got in next to her.

Zoe patted his knee.

‘Come on then, let’s get the hell out of here.’

Sam grunted and turned the key in the ignition.

No one spoke. The radio wasn’t needed. Their thoughts clashed and sparked against each other as they headed away from the city. Black clouds loomed ahead of them, and Sam sped towards the darkness.

Sam drove fast and spoke little. Zoe fidgeted next to him, but the few jokes she tossed his way made little impression. He gripped the steering wheel tight, and the congestion eased as the car sped north. The sky revealed itself, the buildings fell away and for a while the land rose and fell gently around them. But as they approached the Lakes an imposing wall of rocky terrain reared up ahead. It was beautiful and severe, and Sam was struck by the way that the other traffic seemed to vanish, leaving two lonely policemen travelling together, so very much apart.