Sunday 10th December 2023
Chrissy
In the early hours of the next morning, after Tess and Amrit have fallen asleep, Chrissy opens Facebook on her phone. The blue glow of the screen is the only light in her living room. She finds Izzy, adds her as a friend, and sends her a direct message.
Frank Jordan. Does Cliff know anything about him? Could you ask him next time you speak to him? Grateful as always. Chrissy x
Then she puts down her phone and stares across the room, at the shape of her sister asleep on the sofa, flinching every now and then as if she’s having bad dreams.
Chrissy has spent the last hour or so googling Frank Jordan. She now remembers him, the fires. They were in the local news a lot, around twenty years ago. She wasn’t paying much attention to the outside world back then, locked into an increasingly abusive marriage, but she does recall those fires in north Derbyshire, the police convinced they were all linked, all arson, and a particularly bad one in a hotel, which turned out to be a deliberate attack on three people who were staying there. Frank Jordan got careless over that one. He went on the run and Derbyshire Police spent years trying to track him down. He’d been suspected of other crimes before, drug dealing and burglaries, but this was the first one the police knew he’d committed, and were desperate to nail him for.
Chrissy got a shock when she found the news piece about his eventual arrest. There was Peter, looking young and earnest in his uniform, with a statement underneath about how the arrest and charge of ‘one of the area’s most wanted criminals’ had been secured by ‘an officer with a promising career ahead’. She jolted as she remembered. That night. Peter’s celebratory drinks. The cellar, afterwards, her legs wrapped tight around his waist, her arms pulling him closer. It feels so strange that the two things are connected: Leo’s conception and Frank Jordan’s arrest.
An arsonist who died in a fire. There is a dark kind of justice there, but what does it mean? How is it going to help them bring Leo home? She thinks of her charred locket among the debris. Now in a sealed evidence bag in the police station, she presumes. Chrissy told Amrit it was hers, but not that it had been a gift from Alice, a gift that had sometimes felt like a padlock around her neck.
Her phone lights up and she stirs, hoping it’s Izzy. It isn’t a Facebook message, though; it’s a text from Peter.
We’ll find him.
She swallows hard as she looks back over all the other, ignored messages she’s sent him this week. For some reason, this one makes up for his silence. She feels irrationally reassured, and no longer so bleakly alone.
Chrissy wakes to light streaming in through half-open curtains. It’s dawn. Tess is gone from the sofa and she can hear the kettle boiling in the kitchen, the noise that has punctuated the long stretch of the last twelve hours.
There is a searing pain down one side of her neck. She fell asleep in the armchair with her phone glued to her hand. It’s starting to feel like they’re imprisoned here – Tess, Amrit and herself – even though they could venture out whenever they want.
Chrissy checks her phone, panicked to have potentially missed something, and sees that Izzy has replied.
Will ask Cliff when he calls today. Stay strong, babe. Been thinking about you and Leo constantly xxx
Amrit and Tess come into the room carrying three cups of tea between them. For once, Chrissy feels like drinking hers, her mouth bone-dry from the long night. ‘Anything?’ she croaks to Amrit, a shorthand question that’s become as regular as the kettle clicking on.
‘Officers spoke to some of the prison inmates and staff first thing this morning.’
‘Already?’ Chrissy glances at the clock.
‘A lot of them were quite reluctant to say much about Frank Jordan,’ Amrit says, in a tone that’s as close to frustration as Chrissy has heard from her yet.
‘People were … afraid of him?’
‘It seems that way. But one person, a staff member, said they thought Frank and Leo were friends.’
‘Friends?’ Now Chrissy’s eyes pop. ‘Surely not? I’m amazed they were even in the same prison, given …’ She’s about to say, given the difference in what they did, but falters. In her mind, her son is not really a criminal, not like Frank Jordan. But other people don’t see it that way.
‘Well, this prison guard had noticed them whispering together, sometimes. Talking in the yard. He started keeping an eye on their budding friendship, sensing something potentially dangerous about it. He was even thinking about reporting it internally, but then Frank was released so—’
‘What do you mean, potentially dangerous?’ Chrissy breaks in.
Amrit consults her phone. ‘It looked kind of intense,’ she reads from the screen. ‘The guard seemed to think … they might’ve been plotting something.’
Chrissy puts down her tea, no longer able to swallow. Plotting something?
‘But … it might not have been a friendship,’ she says. ‘It might’ve looked like one, but it might’ve been … something bad.’
Amrit says nothing, and Tess looks across at Chrissy with worry in her eyes.
‘Someone should’ve intervened,’ Chrissy adds, fighting tears. ‘Someone should’ve kept him safe.’
She doesn’t add herself to that judgement, but she thinks it for the hundredth time. She should’ve kept him safe.
Hours later, when Chrissy is outside smoking yet another cigarette, Tess sticks her head out of the cottage door and calls to her. ‘Chris, Amrit’s had some more news.’
Chrissy throws away her cigarette and hurries back into the house.
‘Two lots of forensic reports, just in,’ Amrit says. She has both her phone and a laptop in front of her, and her glasses on, looking more business-like than usual.
Chrissy perches on the sofa arm, then stands up again, restless. Tess stands beside her, placing an arm around her shoulders. Chrissy is aware that she must smell – of cigarettes, of sleepless nights and showerless mornings – but Tess stays close.
‘We have the full report on how the fire in the barn may have started,’ Amrit goes on, leaning towards the laptop. She scrolls with the mouse, her eyes moving. ‘Remnants of a metal lighter were found at the scene. It wasn’t possible to ascertain much about it, though, because it exploded …’ She shows Chrissy a photograph, but it is just a mangled piece of metal that might once have been the shell of a Zippo. ‘Does Leo smoke?’
‘Yes,’ Chrissy says.
‘Does he own a metal lighter?’
‘Not that I … He used to buy the plastic disposable ones.’
Amrit swivels the laptop back to herself. ‘Fragments of rope were also found … Experts were unable to conclude whether the fire was started deliberately or accidentally … Lots of dry hay in the barn would’ve caught easily, and the fire would’ve spread quickly … The pathologist’s report on the deceased should indicate whether he was killed by the fire or other means …’
There are more photos of the burnt-out barn, of blackened beams and a half-collapsed roof, and Chrissy stares at them all, searching for signs of Leo, for the things a team of expert strangers might have missed. Why her locket was there. Why any of this has happened.
‘So … they don’t really know how it started?’ she says, sinking down next to Amrit.
‘It’s very hard to be sure.’
‘Or whether Leo was there?’
‘Most of the forensic evidence was destroyed, of course. But …’ Amrit minimises the photos of the barn and opens another document instead. ‘That brings me to the other report …’ The document flashes onto the screen and Chrissy jumps at the words ‘traces of blood’.
She grabs the edge of the laptop.
… confirmed as Leo Dean’s …
‘What’s this?’ she says. ‘Leo’s blood? Where?’
‘This is from the forensic analysis of the stolen car,’ Amrit says.
Chrissy tries to read it quickly over her shoulder, but can barely see past the word ‘blood’. She can hear Tess murmuring, standing behind her now, as if she’s reading under her breath. Amrit subtly moves the laptop out of both their eyelines.
‘Traces of Leo’s blood were found in the boot of the car,’ she says.
Chrissy puts her head between her knees. Amrit’s voice continues but it’s muffled now, as if she’s underwater.
‘It wasn’t a lot,’ Amrit says, as if this will reassure her. ‘But enough to confirm that Leo was in the car—’
‘In the boot?’ Chrissy says to the floorboards.
‘And perhaps injured—’
‘Bleeding.’
‘But the good thing is …’ Amrit pauses. ‘Chrissy, are you okay?’
Her head swims and waves of hot and cold shimmer over her.
‘Chrissy?’ Tess says. ‘Can you look at me?’
Slowly, Chrissy uncurls. Amrit is holding out a glass of water. She takes it and drinks and wipes her mouth. ‘What’s the good thing?’ she asks, hearing how desperate she sounds.
‘This means we can hold the driver and passenger of the car for longer,’ Amrit says. ‘We can arrest them on suspicion of abduction and question them properly.’
Abduction.
‘Can I see the car?’ Chrissy hears herself saying. ‘Can I go to the barn?’
‘Chrissy, is that a good idea?’ Tess says. ‘Think how you’d feel—’
‘I want to see them for myself,’ Chrissy says, putting down the glass of water with a thunk. ‘Please, Amrit. I need to get a sense of where the barn is, what’s around it. I need to see the boot they put him in. I think I’d be able to …’ She falters because she doesn’t know, exactly, what she hopes to achieve. ‘I just think it might trigger something. There’s a piece missing to all this and I’m not going to figure it out sitting here.’
Amrit looks dubious, but not unsympathetic. ‘I don’t know if that will be possible, Chrissy,’ she says. ‘But …’ She shrugs, and picks up her phone. ‘I can ask.’
Chrissy nods emphatically, rubbing her fingers along the seams of her jeans. Her head is a swirl of painful images: Leo’s coat in a crumpled heap, Leo’s blood spattered in a boot, a barn roof collapsing in on him. Her imaginings will get worse, she knows, until she sees something real.
Maybe it’s the same contrary logic that has kept her in this village, even after everything; that kept her living in the flat above the pub after Ethan died, and for a while after Robbie did. Running away from places doesn’t help her. Wherever she lived, she would wake up every day still believing she was in Cromley. Always, inescapably, her home.