“All right, Mrs. Jackson.” Ella doesn’t look the slightest bit surprised to see me as she opens her front door. “Mum’s in the back. Want me to get her?”
I shake my head. “Actually it was you I was hoping to talk to. Is there somewhere we can go?”
“Let’s go to the park.” She glances back into the hall. “I’ll just grab my coat.”
The front door closes and I hear her shout something about popping to the corner shop, and then she reappears in front of me, a crisp ten pound note in her hand.
She grins. “Mum asked me to get her some cigs while I was out.”
***
“If this is about the phone,” Ella says as we sit down on a weather-worn bench on the edge of Queen’s Park, “then you’re wrong if you think I stole it. I didn’t. I only had it because me and Charlotte had a row at school, in the changing rooms after a games lesson. It was a couple of days before, you know…”
“Her accident?”
“Yeah. She left it behind on the bench when she called me a jealous cow and stormed off. I thought I’d keep it for a bit and make her freak out that she’d lost it, but then she got hit by a bus.” She peels the cellophane off her mother’s Marlboro Lights, tears off the foil, and pries out a cigarette with her fingernails. “I didn’t want to give it to you because everyone would think I’d stolen it, so I kept quiet. But then the stuff you said to me made me feel really guilty so I, you know…”
“Posted it through our letter box?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you, Ella.” I smile. “Really, thank you for telling the truth and giving the phone back. But that’s not why we’re here.”
She raises her eyebrows. “Really?”
“Yes, I need to know who Mike is.”
“Mike?” She blinks as the wind changes direction and her exhaled smoke is blown back in her face. “How’d you know about him?”
“Keisha told me.”
“Oh.” She rolls her eyes. “That figures.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” She puts the cigarette to her lips again and inhales. She smokes like a fifty-year-old grandmother on forty a day.
“Come on, Ella, it’s not nothing.”
She tips back her head and exhales. “They’re just dicks, that’s all. Both of them. No wonder they hang around together.”
I frown. “He’s her friend?”
“That or her minder.” She laughs. “The only time they’re not together is when Keisha’s with Danny, and that’s because he refuses to have him anywhere near him. He thinks Mike’s a creepy gay, which he is.”
“A gay?” I assume she means that in the derogatory sense.
“Yeah.” She glances at me. “You know, he likes men.”
What? That contradicts what Keisha told me last night. How can Mike have used a female prostitute and be a gay man? It doesn’t make sense. I look at the packet of cigarettes in Ella’s hands. There’s nothing I’d like more than to spark one up. Instead I cross my arms against the wind, tucking my hands under my armpits. “How well did Charlotte know him?”
“Pretty bloody well!” She gives me a sideways look. “You know, don’t you? That’s what this is all about? You’re pretending like you’re clueless but actually you’re trying to catch me out.”
“Something like that…” I say tentatively, knowing my lie could be discovered in a heartbeat.
“Oh thank God!” She throws her spent cigarette at the ground then slumps back on the bench. “I thought about telling you, after what we talked about the last time you came around, but Charlotte made me swear not to tell anyone. I mean, I know we’re not friends anymore, but I’m no rat.”
“I think this is a pretty unique situation, don’t you, Ella? Ratting on someone to their parents is a bit different if they’re on life support, right?”
“Yeah.” Her head drops and she fiddles with the toggles on her coat.
“Tell me what you know,” I say softly.
“Neither of us liked Mike the first time Keisha introduced him to us,” she says. “He was old and overly friendly and there was something really sly about his eyes.”
I nod for her to continue.
“But after Keisha went off to find Danny, Mike offered to buy us some drinks. We thought he was on the pull, dirty old git, so figured we’d get the most expensive cocktails we could out of him before we did a runner. I had a…” She dismisses the thought with a wave of her hand. “Doesn’t matter what we had, but while we were drinking them, Mike started telling us how he was new to Brighton. He said he’d moved here from London to make a fresh start after splitting up with his boyfriend and losing his niece Martha to cancer. He said he really loved her, said she was like a daughter to him, and that Charlotte reminded him of her. I thought that was a bit creepy, but Charlotte thought it was sweet.”
That’s my daughter, always thinking the best of people.
“So.” Ella licks her lips then pops another cigarette into her mouth. “Once we’d finished the cocktails, I gave Charlotte a look like ‘let’s get out of here,’ but she ignored me and kept on talking to Mike. He bought us some more drinks and they kept talking—about his niece and his job as a photographer, which Charlotte thought was way cool—for ages. I thought we were going to spend the rest of the night chatting to his Royal Gayness.” She shoots me a look. “Sorry, but he wasn’t bothered about talking to me, just her. Anyway, I only managed to drag her away when ‘Love It When You Lie’ came on and we went for a dance.”
“Did you see him again?”
She shakes her head. “Not that night, no. But he was there the next time we went. Keisha wasn’t there that time, and he just strolled up and said hello.”
“So Charlotte and Mike became friends?”
“Yeah.” She shrugs. “That’s part of the reason why we fell out, the fact that she was getting all these new friends and hanging around premiership footballers in Grey’s, and I felt like I wasn’t good enough for her anymore, like she was really up herself. I called her on it, but she said she was just living her life and that it was cool to have a gay friend and that Mike was funny and gave her good advice on clothes and stuff.”
“Clothes?” A sick feeling rises from my stomach as I imagine my daughter in a changing room, parading around half naked in front of a man she barely knows. “What do you mean, he gave her advice on clothes?”
“He took her shopping.” Ella pulls a face. “I know, I was totally jealous. I’m not even going to lie. He must have spent hundreds of pounds on her and got her all designer stuff—the proper labels and everything, not reject stuff from TJ Maxx. It wasn’t just clothes either—he got her sunglasses, CDs, DVDs, loads of shit. Said it made him happy, like he was still buying stuff for Martha.”
Ella’s face is animated as she continues to describe, in minute detail, everything Mike bought for my daughter. I recognize some of the descriptions—I saw them in Charlotte’s room and bought her explanation that they were fakes from a market stall or a car trunk or love tokens from Liam—but others I’ve never seen. The story is plausible enough, a recently bereaved single gay man in a city where he knows no one spots the doppelgänger of his dead niece and showers her with presents in return for her company, and yet, why do I feel like the temperature just dropped twenty degrees?
“What does Mike look like, Ella?”
She shrugs. “Old.”
“How old? As old as me?”
Ella screws up her eyes and scrutinizes me. “Probably, yeah.”
“What else?”
“He was just a bloke, an old bloke with gray in his hair, like any old bloke you see in the street.”
“Think…please, it’s important. How tall was he? Was he fat or thin? What kind of clothes did he wear? Did he wear any jewelry? What were his shoes like? Did he have a mustache, beard, glasses?”
“Like I said.” She twists in her seat and gazes across the park at a bunch of teenagers swinging back and forward on the children’s swings. “He just looked normal, apart from being really tall.” She looks back at me. “He was probably about the same height as my dad.”
So he was about six-foot-four. “What else?”
“He always looked smart—dark trousers and a shirt, that sort of thing. I never saw him in jeans. I don’t remember what shoes he wore.” She glances back at the teenagers. “He had a watch, I think.”
“And his build?”
She sighs. “Medium. He wasn’t fat and he wasn’t thin. And he didn’t wear glasses or have a mustache or beard,” she adds before I can ask. “Oh yeah…” She puts her feet up on the bench and hugs her knees. “His eyes were a really odd color, kind of grayish, and he had quite a big nose and a strange accent. Birmingham? Liverpool? I’m rubbish with accents, but he definitely wasn’t from around here. That okay?” She looks back at me, but I can’t meet her gaze. I can’t tear my eyes away from the teenagers at the other end of the park. She’s just described James, twenty years after I last set eyes on him.
“Sue?” Out of my peripheral vision, I can see Ella unclasping her legs. “You okay? You look weird.”
I was wrong about the school teacher Jamie Evans, but I’m not wrong about this. I can feel it in my bones, the marrow-deep certainty that, somewhere in Brighton and Hove, my ex-boyfriend is watching and laughing, proud of his newest role—bereaved gay man—delighted that he managed to wheedle his way into my daughter’s life right under my nose.
“Did he ever touch her?” I snap around to look at Ella. “Did he hurt Charlotte in any way?”
“Why would he? I just told you, he bought her loads of stuff. He treated her like a princess.”
“What was he blackmailing her about?”
“Blackmailing her?” She shakes her head. “Charlotte never said anything about that. Mike acted like he worshipped the ground she walked on—little miss ‘my dead niece.’”
“Have you got his number? Or his address?”
“No. Liam will though.”
“Liam?”
“Yeah.” She looks at the surprised expression on my face and laughs. “Charlotte wasn’t going to have sex on her own in Mike’s flat, was she?”