Behind Closed Doors (17 page)

‘What makes you say that?’ Lou asked, pulling out of the parking space.

‘I just knew,’ Annie said. She had her face turned away, towards the rain-spattered window, so Lou could not see her expression. ‘Are you a mum?’

‘No,’ Lou said.

‘Well. A mother knows these things. I always knew she was alive.’

It felt as if Annie was backtracking now, that she realised she’d said something out of place and was playing the old ‘mother’s instinct’ card, the one non-mothers had no right to argue with.

Lou changed the subject. ‘I’m glad you managed to get a flight back.’

Annie didn’t answer immediately. Her light summer skirt was wet from the rain, clinging to her legs. Lou noticed she was shivering, so she turned up the heater.

‘They were going to charge us for a full-price ticket to come back, you know. We couldn’t really do that for all three of us – you wouldn’t believe how much it cost. Clive got on to the management and then they caved in. Still charged us an admin fee to change the tickets, though. Juliette’s struggling with everything. She can’t deal with changes to her routine.’

‘What’s the issue with Juliette?’ It was like tugging at a fraying cloth, trying to get Annie to unravel.

‘She has behavioural problems. We still can’t get a firm diagnosis. She falls through all the cracks.’

‘I’m sorry. That must be incredibly difficult.’
Behavioural problems?
Lou thought.
She must be twenty-three by now
…

Annie nodded. ‘She’s fine most of the time. I mean, we all have our quirks, don’t we? But it takes so long to get her used to an idea… so to change things around without notice is, um, catastrophic.’

‘Did you tell her that Scarlett has come back?’

‘No. Not yet. Maybe tonight, when she’s had a chance to settle.’

‘Has she ever talked about Scarlett?’

Another long pause, so long that Lou wondered if Annie had even heard. She was on the verge of repeating the question when Annie came back with an answer. Wistful, as though the thought of it had taken her back across the years to the time when they had all, possibly, been in a happier place. ‘All the time.’

‘She must have found it very, very difficult to deal with.’

‘She wasn’t quite so bad then. I mean, she was… unusual. But it’s like Scarlett’s disappearance set her off. When we came back…’ She trailed off. Something on the road had distracted her. They were at the traffic lights by the bridge, waiting to join the interminable queues around the one-way system. ‘I didn’t realise they’d closed down.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The pub on the corner. I used to drink in there when I was a student.’

‘Oh,’ Lou said. ‘Yes. It closed about a month ago. You were saying? About Juliette?’

‘Mm? Oh…’ Annie seemed lost in thought again. ‘Yes. When we came back – she kept talking about Scarlett as though she wasn’t missing at all. As though she’d gone to visit someone. She kept asking when she was coming back. I mean, she was thirteen, not a baby. She just didn’t seem to understand.’

‘What about the school?’

‘She didn’t go back for months. She was self-harming, tried suicide – you probably know about that. She got counselling, but it didn’t seem to help. She just wouldn’t talk, not to us, not to anyone.’

‘But she talks about Scarlett now?’

Annie gave a short laugh, and turned to look at Lou for the first time since they’d left the VVS. ‘It’s the only thing she does talk about. The only thing. Every day. “When’s Scarlett coming home?” It drives everyone mad. She doesn’t acknowledge us at all any more. That’s why we think she’s going to find it hard to deal with her actual return. She’s not the same Scarlett that Juliette remembers, is she?’

They got stuck in traffic, of course. It was only a couple of miles across town but a bin lorry appeared to have broken down in the middle of a pedestrian crossing and there was gridlock either side of it.

‘Are you going to try to talk to Clive?’ Annie said. ‘I can’t say he’ll be pleased to see you again. You were the one who was always hanging around the house.’

‘Yes,’ Lou said, trying to make light of the less-than-favourable description.

‘He was in a bad place back then. You can’t blame him.’

‘No, I don’t. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for both of you, coming home from Greece without your daughter. But Clive just didn’t want to be interviewed, did he?’

‘He saw it as wasting time. He thought you should all have been out there looking for her, not asking stupid questions. You all kept asking us the same questions, over and over. It was like nobody was listening to the answers.’

I was listening
, Lou thought.
I listened to everything. None of it made sense
.

The traffic ahead cleared and a few minutes later Lou pulled up outside the house. It had stopped raining, thank goodness. Annie was staring up at the hedge as though she’d been away for months. Somewhere nearby, someone was digging up the road or drilling; the noise reverberated around the neighbourhood, then mercifully stopped.

‘It’s a nice house,’ Lou said, her voice suddenly loud.

‘Yes. And nice to get home after a holiday, isn’t it?’

Lou watched her face, trying to read the unreadable. ‘Here’s my card,’ she said. ‘You can ring me any time, if there’s anything you want to talk about. I’ll give you a call in a day or so, maybe to talk to Clive and Juliette. Would that be okay?’

Annie nodded, distracted. She was still looking up at the house. ‘Has she been here?’

‘Has who been here?’

‘Scarlett. Did she sleep here last night?’

Of all the questions
, Lou thought. How would they have got inside? Break in, just so Scarlett could sleep in her old room without anyone else there?

‘No. She hasn’t been here since…’
Since you all left for Greece,
she thought. And left the sentence hanging.

She tried again. ‘Is there anything else you need, Annie? Anything you’d like to ask?’

That seemed to do the trick. Annie looked away at last, opened the door and got out. ‘No – no. Thank you for the lift. It’s very kind of you.’

Lou waited, watching Annie who was standing by the gate, rooting around in her oversized shoulder bag, presumably for her keys. A green Volvo was on the driveway; Clive and Juliette must have got back from the airport too.

The drilling started up again, and Lou drove away.

What was Annie so afraid of? And was it even that – was it fear? After so many years in ‘the Job’, so many interviews and meetings and discussions with all manner of individuals, Lou believed she was good at reading people, good at interpreting emotional states and even better at exploiting them to get the best possible resolution. No, ‘exploiting’ was the wrong word. Turning situations to an advantage, perhaps. You couldn’t rely on someone to behave in a particular way just because you yourself would act like that in a given situation. But, even so, there were certain things you could expect: a missing child would cause grief, panic, hysteria, numbness… and any number of other reactions. But what Annie had displayed instead had been quite different.

The family’s strange behaviour had given the original investigation team cause for concern, and for a long time one of the main lines of enquiry had been that Clive – and Annie – had been responsible for Scarlett’s death and the disposal of her body. They’d been so weird, it had made everyone think they were hiding something. Lou had worked through her allocated investigative tasks, all the time thinking through the options and considering why they might be behaving as they were. She’d thought about Annie being afraid of Clive, but that didn’t seem to fit. Clive wasn’t afraid of Annie, either. They interacted with each other as a perfectly normal family, but with any outsiders they were – well, odd.

She couldn’t read Annie. She hadn’t been able to read her all those years ago, and even less so now.

Caro had gone out to get food when the Social Services woman came back. She had brought a bag of clothes for Scarlett, which were glanced at and discarded at the other end of the sofa.

‘I’ve got my own sodding clothes,’ she said. ‘I don’t need any cast-off shit.’

‘I’ll see if I can sort out a visit to the house where you were living, so you can collect some stuff,’ Sam said. ‘Won’t be till tomorrow, though.’

Scarlett shrugged. ‘I don’t care. I do want my phone back, though. Bastards took it. It’s got all my numbers in it.’ She fixed Sam with an accusing stare.

‘I’ll ask tomorrow,’ Sam said. Not lying, exactly. She could still ask, even if she knew already what the answer was going to be. ‘You were telling me about Nico.’

‘I wasn’t. Your boss mentioned him, not me.’

‘You met him on holiday,’ Sam prompted. ‘It’s just that nobody else – the family I mean – talked about him. Did you keep him a secret?’

Scarlett glanced out of the window, as if Annie might be there, listening in. ‘No. They all knew.’

‘Why do you think they didn’t tell us you’d met someone?’

She picked at a thumbnail, studying it closely, before answering. ‘No idea. You’ll have to ask them. Did your lot interview him? Nico, I mean.’

‘No. They never located him.’

Scarlett gave a short, humourless laugh. ‘Not surprised.’

The front door opened and closed, and Sam heard Caro talking to Orla in the kitchen. Moments later Caro came in with fish and chips, three packets of it, cans of Pepsi, a big tub of table salt and a bottle of ketchup. The smell of the chips made Sam realise how hungry she was.

‘They have chips with mayo in Holland,’ Scarlett said, unwrapping and chewing. ‘I thought I liked it at the time. They never asked if I wanted ketchup – it always just came with mayo.’

‘Nothing like red sauce with chips,’ Caro said cheerfully.

‘I guess it’s good to have a choice,’ said Sam.

Scarlett stopped chewing. After a moment she put the open packet of food down on to the coffee table, cracked open a can and drank. Belched.

‘Talking of choice… you do need to have a think about what’s next, Scarlett,’ Caro said. ‘Where you’re going to go. Think about your options, decide what you want to do.’

Scarlett was motionless, staring at Caro. There was a fiery ball of emotion there, being held back, and Sam recognised that the energy Scarlett was expending just holding herself together was fuelling it. She was going to explode, and there was something about the last part of the conversation that had just lit the fuse.

She got to her feet. ‘I need to go,’ she said.

‘What?’ Caro asked. ‘Go where?’

But Scarlett was already out of the door, flinging it open so hard that the door handle cracked the plaster on the wall, running, running from the room to the hallway, flinging that door open as well. By the time Sam had reacted and followed her, Scarlett was halfway down the street, running down the middle of the road.

She was fast – God, she was fast. Sam was struggling to catch up, realising that she was losing ground.
How’s she so fit?
The air was cold enough to make Sam’s lungs burn with it.

‘Wait!’ Sam shouted, trying to get her to slow down at least, or stop.

‘Fuck off!’ Scarlett screamed, without looking back. ‘Leave me alone!’

At the end of the road Scarlett turned abruptly left into an alleyway. Sam followed, running as hard as she could to catch up. She didn’t know this part of town well, but when she turned the corner Sam realised the alleyway led directly into Memorial Park. Darkness, trees, a playground, a boating lake, a café, which would be closed, of course – where the hell was she going?

By the time Sam got through the metal gate that was supposed to be locked but regularly got broken open, Scarlett had disappeared. Beyond was blackness, nothing but a few feet of path in front of her, street-lights ahead in the distance. Sam stopped, panting hard, coughing, hands on her knees. ‘Scarlett!’

Sam listened. A dog was barking somewhere in the blackness. And then she heard something else. A cry, rising in the chilly air, turning into something unearthly. A wail, a scream.

‘Scarlett!’ Sam followed the path ahead, trying a light jog.

‘I said piss off!’ The voice came from up ahead, high-pitched, ending on a sob. ‘Leave me alone!’

As Sam’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkness she could make out shapes: trees, bushes, the edge of the grass. A bench, with a dark shape hunched at one end of it. Sam made for the bench, sat at the other end. She could hear Scarlett’s breath, coming in jerky spasms.

‘She has no idea,’ Scarlett said. ‘Choice! What choice have I got? What choice have I ever had? It’s a fucking joke…’

Sam said nothing. She waited, while Scarlett cried and cried. After several minutes the breathing began to even out again and the sobs subsided. Sam found a tissue in the pocket of her jeans, passed it down to the other end of the bench.

‘Why are you even still here?’ Scarlett said, snatching the tissue.

‘I’m not sure,’ Sam said cautiously.

‘What sort of an answer’s that?’

‘I don’t want to presume I know what’s best for you, Scarlett. But in the meantime I’m just going to hang around in case there’s anything you need that I can provide. Like, you know, a tissue.’

‘What I need is my bloody phone back. I have got mates, you know. I could be at Reg’s house, watching Sky Movies and entertaining his kid, instead of being holed up in a grotty police house with a bunch of jobsworths.’

‘We may be jobsworths but at least we’re giving you free food, and a hotel room.’

Scarlett made a noise that might have been a laugh. ‘Don’t make me laugh. It’s the Travel Inn. It’s hardly the bloody Ritz, is it?’ There was a pause. ‘Fucking freezing out here. I left my coat behind.’

‘Shall we head back?’

‘In a minute.’

She was taking deep breaths. Steeling herself to go back.

‘I can’t imagine how difficult that must have been, seeing your mother again.’

In the dim light Sam could see Scarlett’s head turn to face her. ‘I bet nobody else sees it like that:
difficult
. Everyone seems to expect me to be bloody overjoyed.’