Three days he’d been in there. Three days and they hadn’t come for her, not yet. She’d heard the voicemails, the police, asking her about the boat and would she please get in touch, but they hadn’t worked it out. They can’t have done or else they’d be here, battering the door down, dragging her out of the house. She’d heard Luke too, his voice wavering. ‘Helen. Are you there? Can you pick up the phone, Helen?’ He would understand, she thought. He must. The calls from the prison were recorded. There was nothing she could say to make him feel better. Not yet.
Now there was someone else, knocking on the door, calling through the letterbox.
‘Ms Groves? Ms Groves? I’m from the Guernsey News. I wondered if you had a minute to talk?’
She stood behind the door, small and still, waited until the woman had gone.
What did the News know? she wondered. What did they want to ask her? It was only a matter of time. She felt the panic well up inside her. She balled her hands into fists, forced them into her eyes. She had to go back. Find the letters, the photographs. He wouldn’t have destroyed them. He’d have hidden them. Ready to produce if she ever broke her promise. If she ever came back for Luke.
Poor Luke. He would be scared, but he would be strong. He’d always been so strong. Cried so much as a baby but hardly at all as a child. As soon as he could walk, he’d been happy. Grazed knees, broken toys, lost pocket money—he’d always kept his cool. Except that one time. The last time.
The silence, that was what she remembered most about that day. The silence ringing in her ears; after the screaming and the screaming and the screaming, it was all so quiet. And then the sound of his little footsteps on the lino—God, how she’d hated that lino; the pattern still haunted her dreams—and he’d heard her crying. It had frightened him. He’d tried to run away from her, from his own mother. And when she’d caught him, the look on his little face. He had burst into tears. It was the last time she’d held him properly, mother to child. Because the next time she’d seen him, he’d been a man. An almost-man. Taller than her. There was something obscene about it, she had thought, that he could have grown inside her belly and sixteen years later tower over her.
She had to go now. She’d waited long enough. Luke would keep his cool—he always did. She would find everything and destroy it, and tomorrow they would have to let Luke go and this whole, decades-long nightmare would be over. It would be just the two of them. The way it always should have been.