No Other Darkness (17 page)

We took the train to Slough. Right to the edge of our parole perimeter. Any closer and we’d be in violation. That word’s playing in my head like violins:
violation
.

We’re in violation, Esther and I.

The windows on the train have two layers of glass, giving us twin reflections.

We take up a table seat for four. No one wants to sit next to us, as if we’ve created our own force field, repelling all boarders.

We’re growing, and it scares me. But I’m excited, too.

From the window of the train, we watch the river running away to London. The tracks swing us close then suck us back, as if subject to the Thames’s tides. The world’s seen a lot of rain since we were last out. The river is swollen all the way to Slough, like a belt that’s been doubled into a strap. I think of her little body in that tide, pushed and pulled. The thought brings the strap down on to my back and drives a knife into my chest.

The river looked so gentle that morning. It was like lying her down on a bed of brown silk. If I concentrate, I can see her face, smiling up at me. She doesn’t haunt me like the boys.

Fred and Archie would never have gone into the water the way she did, quietly and with a smile. Archie would’ve dived in after his baby sister. He had bravery in spades. They both did, such fierce boys. Archie would’ve fought Esther, if I’d let him.

The train runs parallel to the river for a moment, so close I can see my face in its swollen back. I think about the fisherman who found her.

Esther and I didn’t just hurt the children, you see. There were so many other people involved. The fisherman who found Louisa. The jury who convicted us. Connie, and Matthew, and all their friends. I sometimes think about that boy, Saul Weller, who fought with Archie until they became best friends. And now this new family, the ones living in the house that Ian built, over the bunkers. The ones who found Fred and Archie.

It’s in the papers. It can’t be long now before they piece it together and pick up the phone to the parole board. We’ll be back inside soon. But not before we’ve taken our proper punishment. Not before we’ve looked into the mirror.

Lyn gave us an uptight farewell, one last volley of shots: ‘Be-kind-to-yourself-and-take-care.’
Rat-a-tat-tat.

Be kind to yourself.

Why
, I wanted to ask,
with what purpose?

Perhaps I should feel pity for our plight. Thrown out of the place that was keeping us safe, chucked to the wolves of real life. Sharp objects and tall buildings, rivers and bridges and cheap aspirin and razor blades. The public gaze.

Mirrors, everywhere.

How are we going to survive this?

Perhaps
–
oh, this is clever, this is brilliant
–
perhaps
this
is our punishment.

Ron said, ‘Shit.
Shit.
’ He swung a fist at the whiteboard, making it rattle.

Debbie covered her mouth with her hand, eyes glassy with tears.

Marnie said, ‘We need a photograph of Esther Reid. We need dates for her arrest, for her confession and her trial. I want the name of the arresting officer, and the psychiatrist who treated her in prison. We need to know where and who and
what
Esther Reid is now.’

‘Who?’ Ron echoed.

‘We think she has a new identity. She’s been rehabilitated.’

‘Why’re we even looking, if she’s done her time?’

‘Because someone left this,’ Marnie set the tin of peaches on the desk, ‘outside the Doyles’ house, last night or early this morning. If it was Esther, it’s a breach of her parole. She lied about the deaths. She said the boys drowned. We need to interview her about that.’

‘We’re going to charge her with new offences?’ Debbie said. ‘When she’s just been released?’

‘If she’s committed any, yes.’

‘Shit,’ Ron repeated. He looked beaten.

‘We have names for the boys. Archie and Fred Reid. Put them on the board. And find a picture of Esther Reid.’

Marnie understood the team’s despondency. They’d imagined they were chasing a psychopath, a paedophile or worse. All the time they’d been looking for the boys’ mother, driven mad by her body’s reaction to giving birth; one of nature’s sicker tricks. Perhaps the boys had suffered less than they would have done at the hands of the monster they’d all imagined, but it was so desperately
sad
.

Marnie wasn’t sure she didn’t prefer their earlier theory to this terrible reality.

She tapped the tin of peaches, looking across at Debbie. ‘How are you getting on with the press? Has anyone sent in photos they took of the crowd yesterday?’

‘Not yet. A couple have said they’ll cooperate, but I’m already getting excuses about press freedom thrown at me . . .’

‘Stick at it. Noah, you and Ron found a website that sells these tins? See if you can get customer records for recent orders in the London area. What do we have on Connie Pryce?’

‘Council records are coming,’ Noah said, ‘for the flat. I’ve asked for the date she moved out, and anything else they have.’

‘Good. Find out about Esther’s other relations, and her friends. Anyone she might have gone to when they let her out. Her parole officer should have what we need. Ron, where’re you up to with the travellers?’

‘About here.’ Carling held the flat of his hand to his eyes. ‘They
might
be on a site near Heathrow. I was going to take a recce in that direction this morning.’

‘Let’s wait until we have a photo of Esther, and some dates. If she was released into Connie’s care, then we’ll want to come with you.’ Marnie nodded at Noah. ‘After we’ve
been back to see what Ian Merrick wasn’t telling us the first time round.’

 • • • 

The Isle of Dogs was deserted. No workmen on-site, Merrick’s mobile office locked and empty. It was like seeing a school playground after dark, the whole shape of the place altered by the absence of people. ‘Where is everyone?’ Noah wondered.

‘UXB stops play?’ Marnie stepped out of the way of a chip wrapper breezing towards them. She took out her phone and called the station, asking the team to get hold of Merrick.

‘Do you think he lied to us?’ Noah said.

‘It looks that way. Either Esther found out about the bunkers and didn’t tell him, or they both knew the bunkers were never filled in. If he got the land cheap, cut corners . . . Didn’t Denis Walton say the houses were thrown up? Then I imagine Merrick knew. If Esther was working for him, and
she
knew?’ Marnie shrugged. ‘He knew.’

‘D’you think he lied about more than just the bunkers? He must’ve known Esther was arrested, and for what. We told him we’d found the bodies of two little children down there. He could have put two and two together. Maybe he
did
put two and two together.’

‘And decided it was best to keep his mouth shut? Maybe.’

They were quiet for a moment, standing in the empty chill of the site.

Noah broke the silence by asking, ‘Does it matter?’

Marnie pushed her hair from her face, knotting it at the nape of her neck. ‘Because Esther was punished? Because her children are dead and there’s no killer to catch? It matters.’

‘The tin of peaches,’ Noah deduced. ‘If Esther left them . . . Why? Why would she go back? There’s nothing there for her.’

‘Nothing obvious,’ Marnie said. The wind whipped her hair loose again. She narrowed her eyes against the sting of it. ‘Come on. Let’s talk to Fergus Gibb.’

‘The fisherman who found Louisa? Can he give us anything we don’t already know?’

’Maybe not, but if I was Esther Reid? I’d want to go back to where I last saw my children alive. We’ve been concentrating on the bunker, but perhaps she’s been to the river too. The place she put Louisa. The place she
said
she put the boys. I want to see it.’

The river moved reluctantly, resisting the tug of the tide. A long bank led to the road where Marnie had parked.

Slippery mud hauled at their boots as she and Noah made their way to the water’s edge. She didn’t know how the fishermen stopped their camping stools from sinking into it. Three men were fishing, their lines in the water, hooded yellow oilcloths worn to keep the damp out. The mud was like the river, hungry, belching at their boots. The sound rose from deep inside the wide muscle of water coiling across London, carrying God knows what out to sea.

Fergus Gibb hadn’t been down here by the water in five years. Not since he found the body of a baby girl floating in a polystyrene box.

‘The kind they pack fish in,’ he’d told Marnie and Noah, ‘for market. You find all sorts washing up there. It wasn’t the first time I’d found something that shouldn’t have been in the river. But it was the worst time. She was so,’ he framed a foot with his hands, ‘small.’

‘We’re sorry,’ Marnie said, ‘for making you go through this again.’

‘Never stop going through it,’ Fergus replied. ‘Not a day
goes by. I gave up the fishing, can’t even walk the dog by the river now.’ The dog was at his feet, grizzled chin tucked into its paws. ‘Time was I’d have said you couldn’t lose anything in the river, not for long. The mud’s like a magnet, but it sends everything back up eventually. We used to joke it was the best place to lose a pound, and the worst place to bury a corpse. The river sends it all back up.’ He leaned to put a hand on the dog’s head. ‘Not the boys, though.’

The river had sent back Louisa Reid. It hadn’t returned her brothers, Fred and Archie, because it’d never had them.

Esther had lied to the police, to everyone. She’d put Louisa into the water, but the boys . . .

The boys she hid underground, as if they’d be safe there.

Marnie tried to put herself in Esther’s shoes, she really did. Tried for empathy, some thread of connection to the woman’s madness, her pain. From what Fran said, it was likely that Esther had suffered from depression as a teenager. Maybe she’d felt she didn’t belong. Maybe all this started with an escape. Running away . . .

Marnie could understand that.

She watched the city guttering in the water’s edge, London’s landmarks reflected in the turning tide. Everywhere around, the mudflats were fired by orange street light into abstract sculptures, as if the city’s salvage was being thrust up from the shore.

The river’s breath sat wet and slick on the yellow oilskins of the three fishermen.

Tamas
, Fergus Gibb had called the Thames, giving the river its old name. Father Thames. Some father, taking the body of Louisa Reid, only to return it, shrunken and grey.

‘They say the river can carry a body a mile a day,’ he’d told them, ‘but it didn’t carry her.’ He walked the dog in another direction now, away from the river to a scrub of parkland, one of London’s meaner green squares.

At Marnie’s side, Noah shivered. His shoulders were hunched, in a bid to keep the cold from creeping into his ears.

Marnie felt a pang of guilt for bringing him here. Maybe Noah didn’t need this nearness in order to do his job. Maybe it was just her who needed to rub up against the sharpest corners of the crime, the tragedy.

Esther Reid had smothered her baby and wrapped her in a blanket. Put her in a box, and put the box into the Thames. Crime scene investigators had discovered a neat pile of clothes on the bank. Not just Louisa’s clothes. Fred and Archie’s, too. They searched for days with police divers and dogs, but they couldn’t find the boys. Esther said she’d drugged them and put them in the water. She said they drowned.

Empathy was impossible.

Marnie doubted that Esther Reid, wherever and whoever she was now, could feel empathy for the woman she’d been when she killed her children. She doubted Esther would want empathy, or sympathy, for the woman who did that.

Standing at the water’s edge, all Marnie felt was sadness. Desperate, soul-corroding sadness – and fear, for what a woman waking up to that nightmare might do.

‘Christ, it’s cold.’ Noah tipped his head back at the sky. ‘But at least it’s out in the open.’

Not underground, in other words.

‘Yes.’ Marnie looked upstream, the heels of her boots sinking in pleats of mud. The police had dragged the riverbed for more than a mile. No sign of the boys, anywhere.

How easily would she have given up the search, had she been in charge? How long did you decently look for lost children? Five years, alone in the dark. Would she have looked for them that long? Would she have found them if she had?

Noah’s phone played the theme from
The Sweeney
.

‘DS Jake. Yes . . . Hang on.’

He turned on the speaker, holding the phone so Marnie could listen at the same time.

‘Beth Doyle just called.’ Debbie Tanner’s voice was strained. ‘Her kids are missing, Carmen and Tommy. She’s in a right state.’

‘When was this?’

‘Just now. She’s on the other line. I wanted to call you right away. She doesn’t know how they got out of the house, only took her eyes off them for five minutes, thought they were with Clancy, maybe at the park, but she went to look for them and there’s no sign. Anywhere. I’m on my way over to her. I wasn’t sure how quickly you could be there.’

‘Forty minutes,’ Noah said, ‘if the traffic’s not too bad.’

He and Marnie started back towards the car.

‘It’s only been an hour, I know.’ Debbie’s voice broke up for a second, from static or stress. ‘But I thought
these
kids . . . that family . . .’

‘You’re right,’ Marnie told her. ‘We’ll be there as soon as we can. Stay with Beth until we get to you. And put in a report on the missing kids. Let’s not take any chances, or waste any time. If you get push-back, send it my way. We’ve got grounds for worrying about these kids, given what’s happening in Blackthorn Road.’

‘It couldn’t be Esther,’ Debbie said. ‘Could it? I mean . . . she wouldn’t do that. Take someone else’s kids?’

‘We can speculate later,’ Marnie said. ‘Clear the line. We’re on our way.’

She’s upstairs. You can tell by the creak of the floor, and the heat over your head when you stand in the hall, listening. A hot spot in the house. Dangerous.

She’s in the nursery, with the baby.

You’re a coward. You don’t go up straight away. Instead, you look for Fred and Archie. To be sure they’re safe.

They’re on the sofa in the sitting room, in their pyjamas. Archie’s playing on his DS. Lolling at his shoulder, Fred’s got his thumb in his mouth and his eyes are glassy, the way they were when he was a baby. He’s nearly five now, but he’s regressed, gone back behind the barricades of baby-speak, whining when he doesn’t want his food.

‘Archie?’

‘What?’ Archie’s angry. His version of Fred’s regression; the pair of them hunkered down, in defence mode. It’s a bad sign. It means it’s been a bad day.

‘Have you eaten?’

Archie rolls his eyes as if you should know this, as if you
fed the pair of them yourself. He jabs at the game console with his thumbs, killing stuff. He’s eight years old.

The heat shifts overhead, away from the nursery, towards the bathroom.

Your throat makes a fist. You put everything away, didn’t you?

Razor blades and pills, make-up bags with metal zips; you even changed the light switch from a pull cord to a presser in case she found a way to make a noose of the nylon cord.

‘Esther?’ You climb the stairs two at a time, breathless by the time you reach the top.

The bathroom door’s shut, but not locked. You took out the locks, after the last time. The shadow’s still there on the join between the tiled floor of the bathroom and the carpeted floor of the landing: the place where the blood leaked. You cleaned the tiles, but the carpet sucked up the stain and put down a shadow you can’t shift.

The heat coming from the other side of the bathroom door is horrible, as if someone’s lit a fire in there.

You reach your hand to the door, half expecting the handle to burn you.

You’re scared now, bile at the back of your throat. ‘Esther . . . are you okay?’

You’d smell smoke if there was a fire.

It’s not a fire. It’s just her.

Esther.

You made a pact, the two of you. After you took the locks from all the doors. You promised to always knock when the door was shut, and wait for her to answer. A pact to preserve her dignity. Yours was lost long ago. Given up for dead, like your courage.

You turn and go down the landing to the nursery.

Louisa’s not in her cot. Just the covers, pulled neat. That’s bad. Neatness is bad.

It means Esther’s on a binge.

You’ve tried explaining this to the doctors, the midwife, anyone who’ll listen. They say it’s a good sign that she’s noticing things, taking care of housework. You know better. She’s trying to fend off the flood. It’s the first sure sign that chaos is on its way. Again.

You have to go into the bathroom now, you have to.

For Louisa.

You make up a story in your head, a version of what you’ll find. Something safe and normal, so that you have the courage to go in there. She’s changing Louisa’s nappy. She’s washing her hands. She’s on the loo. She’s having a bath, like she used to with Archie, the baby sitting on her stomach, the pair of them perfectly happy. No, not the bath, that’s where she did it last time . . .

You’re sick, shaking. Your thighs are sweating.

‘Esther . . .’ You turn the handle, push at the door.

The first thing you see is the mirror, the plastic one you put up in place of glass.

Your feet prick at the sight, remembering the broken pieces on the tiles, a splinter that went deep into your heel. Your face is in the mirror, crowded out by hers.

‘Esther . . .’

You flinch at the sight of her reflection, the newly alien familiarity, like an over-realistic Hallowe’en mask. You shift to one side so the two of you are sharing the mirror, your faces sliced in two; a bad Abba video.

She’s standing there naked, all her scars and welts on show, and you know . . .

She’s doing an inventory, looking for a place to put some new damage.

Her fists are clenched. You’re afraid she’s got hold of something sharp.

You put it all away, didn’t you?

Your eyes scare to the tooth mug (plastic). Prisoners make weapons out of toothbrushes, and carrier bags. They melt them down and make them into sharp objects.

Fred and Archie’s toothbrushes are in the mug. And yours, Esther’s . . .

Your eyes jump around the room, looking for what she’s hidden.

‘Where’s Louisa?’

She doesn’t look at you.

She’s breathing low and deep, like an engine, like a furnace.

Her shadow stretches up the walls, falls into the bath and paints the cupboards black.

You know that if she fought you, you’d lose.

She’s holding all the power. She’s holding . . .

‘Where’s Louisa?’ There’s a whine in your voice, like Fred’s when he doesn’t want his food. Like the puppy, Budge, until she had to go; too many things to worry about.

You’re losing this fight. Like all the others.

‘Please,’ sobbing now, ‘Esther, where is she? Where’s Louisa?’