Part of the Silence

Jack stuck his head round Abbie’s door. “Glad I caught you. Do you have a minute?”

He went in, closed the door behind him, then sat on the chair opposite her desk, placing the bag he was carrying on the floor. It contained the blood-stained fabric Beamer had found. “Last night I stopped by Jessamine Cottage to look at the place. I wanted to get a sense of where Evie lived. As I was leaving, I noticed some lights in the woods. They seemed to be hanging around. I thought I’d better take a look.”

“Go on.” He had her full attention.

“At first, there were a couple of flashlights. Then they were joined by more. Eventually, there were about four of them. I got as close as I could without letting them know I was there. I wasn’t sure what to make of what happened next.” He glanced at her, but she was still listening intently. “From the way they moved, it looked as though one of them was carrying something. The beam was flashing around all over the place, as if someone was struggling with something. I heard this cry. I assumed it came from them.”

“What kind of cry?” she said sharply.

“High pitched. Like an animal. I think, in all honesty, it could have been a child.” He glanced at her again. “I thought they’d killed whatever it was, but they’d barely started. I heard someone laugh. It sounded evil. Then there was another cry, more of a scream this time, which went on and on.” Jack could still hear its echo in his head. “I tried to get close enough to see what was going on. Then I startled a pheasant.”

He relived the moment the flashlights had spun round toward him. “I honestly thought they were going to come after me. Lucky for me, a stag picked that moment to go crashing through the woods in the other direction. It completely distracted them. They left not long after.”

“Did you see anything else?”

“After they’d gone, I went over to where I’d seen the lights. There was blood on the ground. Not just drops. Quite a lot of blood.” He didn’t tell her about the stag standing there, watching him. “I bent down to see if it was fresh. Then, as I got up, there was someone behind me.”

Abbie looked startled.

“Frightened the life out of me. Fortunately, I knew who it was.”

Abbie leaned forward. “Who?”

“Miller. He was on his way to Evie’s when he saw the lights, too.”

“He hasn’t mentioned it to me.” Abbie was frowning.

Jack shrugged. “He probably knew I would. Anyway, I don’t think he’s in yet.”

“No. Not if he was on duty last night.” Abbie was quiet. “What do you think was going on?”

Jack shook his head. “It was probably poachers.”

“It doesn’t sound like poachers. . . .” Abbie looked at him.

Jack sighed. “If you really want to know, last night I was thinking about the Leah Danning case.” He looked at Abbie. “It wasn’t long after I started here. At the time, no one talked about anything else. Then, last night, I was thinking the same thing’s happened again.” He frowned. “And maybe I’m wrong, but it’s not the kind of thing that happens round here—”

“Children go missing everywhere,” Abbie interrupted.

“I know.” Jack was silent. “But historically, apart from Leah Danning, there are no other cases. There was something about the way Leah vanished that doesn’t add up. Dogs were brought in—straightaway. The countryside was searched and searched again. Yet there was no sign of her.” He paused.

“What are you suggesting?” Abbie frowned.

“It’s the same with Angel.” Getting up, Jack went on. “The fact that there’s no trace of her. It’s the common denominator in the two cases. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

Abbie was silent. “And?”

“I don’t know. Either we have someone incredibly methodical who’s completely covered their tracks, or someone’s hiding something.”

“You’re not suggesting someone on the inside?” Abbie looked horrified.

Jack shook his head. “I was thinking more along the lines of someone—anyone—deliberately concealing evidence to throw us off the track.” Seeing Abbie’s face, he shrugged again. “Just thoughts.”

But Abbie was thinking. “Do you by any chance know a man named Xander Pascoe?”

Jack shook his head. “I haven’t met him. He was a suspect for a while when Leah Danning disappeared. But I know his mother. Janna Pascoe.” She was a formidable woman. A true matriarch was how Jack thought of her. “She was walking through Truro when she was hit by a car. It must have been a good ten years ago. The driver was being chased by the police. He got away, and she was rushed to the hospital. She recovered, but she lost the use of her legs.”

“What do you know about her?”

Jack shrugged. “She’s a tough lady. Her husband died way back, and she’s been running the farm ever since. After she was hit by the car, she sued the police and lost, but she has money. The house is full of antiques. And art.” He remembered it all well, the mess of the farmyard and what looked like a run-down old Cornish farmhouse on the outside. Inside, it was like a museum. “That’s all I know—apart from the fact that she hates the police.”

“Right.” Abbie was frowning.

“I think that’s about all I can tell you.”

“Xander Pascoe was interviewed when Leah Danning went missing. He’s a strange one. Surrounded by a wall of silence is how it seems. No one had a bad word to say about him. The police were never able to prove anything, but somewhere in the notes from the investigation, it mentions that when they searched the Pascoes’ home, they found a kind of shrine in Xander’s room. They didn’t take it further, because Xander had alibis.” She paused.

Then Jack remembered. “Last night my dog heard something outside. I let him out, and he ran off. When he came back, he was carrying this.” He picked up the plastic bag containing the bloodstained fabric. “The blood was wet when he brought it in. I’ll send it to forensics.”

Abbie hesitated, then seemed to make a decision. “Are you busy? Or do you have time to show me where you saw the people last night?”

Jack thought about what awaited him, none of it important. “There’s nothing that can’t wait.”

“Maybe we should go and take a look.”

* * *

Jack pulled up close to where he’d parked last night, Abbie just behind him. As they walked through the woods by daylight, there was none of the sense of menace he’d felt last night. Apart from the occasional cry of a bird, it was completely quiet.

“We need to go this way.” He pointed to a narrow path that sloped downhill. It had taken him a while to get his bearings, but now he knew exactly where he was.

“This is where I hid, watching them.” They’d reached the patch of brambles he’d crouched behind. “The flashlights seemed to come from over there.” He pointed to where the trees thinned slightly.

Abbie slowly started walking in the direction he’d pointed, studying the ground as she went. As Jack followed behind her, he was trying to work out where he’d seen the last two lights coming from.

“Where did you see the blood?” She stopped in the middle of the path.

“Somewhere here.” Jack gestured to an area that he thought was reasonably accurate. Slowly, methodically, both of them scrutinized the ground, but there was nothing. Then Abbie stooped down to pick up a handful of leaves and let them flutter to the ground.

“There’s nothing here.”

Jack didn’t reply. He was looking at the leaves she’d just picked up, at where they’d settled on other leaves. He frowned. “If you wanted to cover your tracks, you’d do exactly what you’ve just done.”

“Excuse me?”

He walked over to where she was standing, then bent down and scooped up more of the leaves. “It would be the easiest way to hide blood on the leaves. Pile on more leaves. Unless someone really looked, no one would ever be the wiser.”

After crouching down, he started to remove carefully the top layer of leaves, then the next, until it was clear he’d reached leaves that had been there a long time. Then he moved slightly to one side and repeated the process again and again; behind him, Abbie did the same.

“Jack?” he heard her say. “You better come here.”

He walked over to where she stood looking at the leaves she’d uncovered, where the blood from last night was clearly visible, no longer fresh but congealed and dried.

She reached for her phone.

CASEY

2000 . . .

My sister was given a pretty name, Leah. With her white-blond hair and fair skin, there was proof, indisputable, right in front of you, that I was the plain child with the plain name. Dull, where Leah sparkled; emotionless, while Leah’s default beaming smile lit up rooms and seemed to touch people’s actual hearts. It wasn’t fair, Leah having that hair, that smile, and skin that was soft as a peach.

I got used to it. You can get used to anything. Now, as soon as I saw Anthony’s face, a haze would come over me, and his voice would seem to fade into the distance, as though I wasn’t there anymore. He could do whatever he liked, but he couldn’t hurt me.

The last time, his friend Barney had been there. I’d been really scared at the thought of two of them. And the shitface had seen my fear, because as he glanced across at Barney, I’d thought of a snake watching its prey, its eyes lit up, its tongue flickering across its lips.

I didn’t know what had changed that time. I’d wanted to go to that faraway place in my mind, but I couldn’t. Instead, I’d felt the most putrefying, stinking emotions rage through me, like sewage in my veins. I was frightened, revolted, reviled. Then, suddenly, as I looked at him, at my hand obediently doing what he wanted it to, anger rose in me. Anger that was like bile, choking me, until I forgot about my fear.

As I thought about everything he’d done to me, which he was going to let his friend do, I screamed as loudly as I could. In that moment, I saw an evil in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. I struggled away from him, then found myself cornered. A new fear came over me. I wasn’t sure what he was going to do to me. I tried to scream again, but I was paralyzed. Then, as he closed in on me, I threw up.

He jumped back, but not before the stream of vomit hit him full on. In his hurry he caught a lamp on his bookcase, sending it crashing onto the floor. Sweet relief as I heard Auntie Maureen coming. While her footsteps drew closer, Anthony begged me not to tell her.

“Why?” I stared at him, wondering how he’d explain the vomit down the front of him, liking the power I suddenly had. Why shouldn’t I tell her what kind of a monster her son was? What was in it for me if I kept silent?

“She’ll fucking kill me. I know she will. ”

I didn’t care what she did to him. I glanced around the room, latched on to the first thing I saw that interested me. “Give me your radio.”

“Take it,” he whined, and I snatched it up.

“If you ever touch me again, I’ll tell her everything,” I spat at him just as we heard her voice outside.

I took my trophy home with me. Even though I thought of Anthony every time I looked at it, it represented a personal kind of victory over a world that seemed against me. I knew Anthony would never bother me again. And I was nearly fourteen. Old enough to be left alone. Not to have to go to Auntie Maureen’s ever again.

Life breaks you down into tiny, dirty pieces. If you’re one of the lucky ones, it builds you up again. When your safety is threatened, when you’re forced to confront fear, they say you grow stronger. But not all of us. Some of us stay broken.

But you always learn. Not to trust people. That evil comes in many forms. That every bully has an Achilles’ heel. That silence always has a price.

* * *

As Leah got older, I waited for her charm to fade, for things to get easier, but they didn’t. I had parents who were blinkered in their own small world, and I didn’t fit.

I still had that same freaking wallpaper. My father had refused to spend good money on something I’d destroy; that was how he’d put it. I’d already proved I wasn’t trustworthy. But neither was he.

I wasn’t shocked when I found out about his affair. Wrapped up with my perfect, pretty little sister, my mother pretended not to notice, but I could tell. All those excuses about staying to work late, having important out-of-the-blue meetings, coming home with booze on his breath and someone’s lipstick not quite wiped away.

It didn’t change anything. I already hated him. I had a mother who cared only about my sister, and a father who cared only about himself. I’d been born into a fragmented family, where children weren’t born equal, where everyone cared only about themselves.

Being alone was better, in my dark, shabby bedroom, which was the inverse of Leah’s pretty, light room. Lying on my bed, I’d pick at more wallpaper, unfairness eating away under my skin, into my very soul. One entire wall had been revealed, pocked with the stubborn bits of glue that refused to budge, and I’d started on another, loosening the edge of the paper with a short fingernail, freeing enough that I could grasp it between my fingers and slowly tear it.

I had perfected the art of keeping the pieces as long and thin as possible. When I finished one, it was discarded onto the floor, where it joined others, and I never noticed the untidiness. It didn’t matter. Not to my parents, not to me. They’d made it clear to me a long time ago that I wasn’t deserving of better.

There was something comforting about the air of decay in there. Maybe because it was the only corner in a bland suburban home where I felt I belonged, my frustration gouged into the windowsill in a legacy of deep scratches. On the naked wall, black Sharpie scrawls of anger. Screw you, fuckers. It didn’t actually say that in bold letters, but it may as well have.

It was the only place I could be alone. With the door closed, I could allow my mind to go wherever it pleased. Not to stupid dream worlds with handsome princes and happily ever afters. I wasn’t naive. There were other places, safer ones, that were more real, where illusions didn’t exist, where the pretense that life should be happy was dropped. Places of darkness.

Everything was clear in the dark. There were no distractions. Your senses, your intuition, were sharper, louder. There was no escape from what you thought, felt, or saw. And my mind wandered. I couldn’t stop it, any more than I could stop seeing the images that floated past me, opaque, unsettling, whispering in the darkness, playing their stories out against my peeling walls.

In there, it was my world. I was in control, was writing the script of the macabre theater scenes, manipulating the characters as I pleased. But projected onto my wall, they were no strangers. There was my father, for instance, in his golf clothes. On Sundays, he always played golf—code for picking up bored married women he wanted to shag. He’d taken me with him, but only once, because he realized I saw too much.

The scene in my room: my father stands above a golf hole, only instead of being surrounded by a pristine course, it’s a writhing black pit. The word “arrogant” hangs over his head, uneven, heavy letters suspended in the air for the world to see, because that was what he was. Arrogant and superior and overbearing, with a sense of self-worth I utterly detested. The caring father, successful businessman, loving husband stripped away, my images showed him as he was.

I enjoyed those pictures. With practice, I could make anything happen. Time and time again, I’d replay them, watching as someone emerged from the shadows beside him or behind him, raised the gun, fired. The gunshot was real. So were the birds, their song deafening, as the breeze ruffled my hair and the red mark appeared on his forehead. As he stopped talking for the last time, as his legs crumpled. His body prostrate, unmoving, lifeless.

Many times I killed my father. Sometimes the killer was another golfer, biding his time, his rifle hidden in his bag of golf clubs. Once it was a woman, her hair the same color as mine, her eyes blank as she fired. After, she dropped the gun, walked slowly away. And always birds, which would swoop down as I reached my arms out, their sound soothing me, my hair fanned across my face by the beating of their wings.

After it was over, I’d make another mark in the windowsill, gouging through the aging gloss paint, thinking of my father’s hateful face, feeling the anger build inside me because he was still alive. Needing a thousand deaths to assuage the gaping, hollow emptiness in me, because it wasn’t enough.

I needed more to make the pain, the hurt, go away. Only one thing helped. After rolling up my sleeve, I reached for the razor blade I kept hidden for such times, pressed it against my skin carefully, with just the right amount of pressure, felt the cool metal starting to cut.

* * *

When the gun became too quick, too painless a death for my father, I reached into my head for something worse. Suffocation, because he knew what was happening to him, was fully conscious as he realized he was going to die. A knife, straight through his heart, satisfying for its brutal imagery, as I eased the blade into my own pale skin, seeing instead a serrated knife, my father’s throat.

It made sense that a death should reflect a life, that someone guilty of inflicting years of suffering should themselves suffer. It was a thought that obsessed me as I made the punishment fit the crime, the justice last as long as the relief when I cut.

My mother didn’t deserve an ugly death. She wasn’t a bad person, just a weak, obsessive, small-minded one. When it came to her, I had the perfect murderer, a kind of ironic one. My mother was to die at the hand of the person she lived for. Leah. It was Leah who’d wind the narrow pink scarf around her neck, then pull, until our mother’s eyes bulged, and she was too weak to fight as her oxygen supply was cut off.

I could watch over and over, unemotionally, dispassionately, the same oddly quiet scene every time. The snow starting to fall, my mother collapsing to her knees. Her acquiescence as Leah slowly choked the life out of her, because Leah could do no wrong. The snow turning to glitter, so that in death, my mother’s body was far more beautiful than it had been in life.

Killed so prettily, with a pink scarf, snow, and glitter. For my mother, that was enough.

Of course, it was logical that after she’d killed my mother, Leah had to die, too. If you asked me why, I couldn’t explain. And when it came to her, I didn’t have to do a thing.

We went to a nearby lake, a place my mother had taken me to just once. Leah was standing on the bank, gazing at the giant lily pads that grew there, the buds unfurling in a wave of soft pink across the water.

As I watched, she stepped out onto it, a tiny figure surrounded by flowers, and jumped onto a giant leaf, then the next. I could have called to stop her any time. Instead, I stood and watched.

As she reached the third leaf, she turned back to look at me and started to sink—so slowly you couldn’t be sure it was happening; and silently, even when the water was at waist height—all the while her eyes staring into mine.

I sat on the bank, tearing the petals off a daisy, until the flowers closed over her head. Then I got up and walked away.

I didn’t want to think these things, and they weren’t real, but I couldn’t stop myself. It was my life that had made them happen. I’d become a reflection of the light and shadow, love and hate, inside my family and out.

* * *

As more time passed, I couldn’t stop thinking what it would be like without them. We had genes in common, but that was all. By now I rarely spoke to them. Why would you talk to someone who only ever told you off or put you down? Who took obvious pleasure in pointing out how you were a failure. Who, with every word, reminded you how worthless you were. Words, which could so easily have comforted or cared, were instead chosen to destroy you.

While I was a nothing, Xander Pascoe was all things to all people. In some ways he reminded me of Anthony. It was his arrogance, the sense of the world owing him a favor. The leer that brought bile rushing to my throat. Yet underneath was steely control. He was only a little older than me, but people did what he said. It was why, on one of my darkest, most desperate days, when he said, “Tell me,” I did.

He was the one person who listened. I told him how my parents didn’t trust me. How I wasn’t reliable. Look at the state of my room, they pointed out. I couldn’t look after myself, let alone my sister.

“No faith, no belief, no trust, because you’re unworthy, Casey. Can’t do anything right. No matter how hard you try, you’re not good enough. Lucky for us, we have Jen.”

Jen, with her sparkling eyes, her naive, trusting face. Jen, who was the same age as I was, who was from a world a million miles away from the one I lived in, where dreams came true and no one was ever nasty. The light to my shadow.

At school, she haunted me, flitting in and out of my classes with her shiny hair and her A grades, always there, everywhere I went. Do you know how that felt, Jen? To be the shadow? To have the name teachers didn’t remember, to be the girl no one wanted to be friends with? You were the lead in the school play, captain of the sports teams, constantly adding to the list of your achievements. But you didn’t know, did you, that no one has it all; that ultimately, at some point, unfairness is redressed, light fades; that there is always balance?

For me, there was no escaping you. No shielding myself from your brightness. Not at school, when friends flocked around you. You were in my home, too. I remember how it felt to watch as they paid you to replace me—trustworthy, reliable Jen, so much better at everything than I was.

They were pretty, Jen and Leah. I used to watch them from upstairs, talking and laughing, but it wasn’t until the second time she came that I realized what had happened, how cheap I was. For the price of a few pounds on a Saturday morning, I was so quickly replaced.

I let familiar hurt stab me inside, fought the desire to cut myself, lost the battle, grateful when numbness set in as I watched Leah and Jen, the pretty new sister my parents had bought her, spinning round in the yard, the sound of their laughter filling my ears, as another way came to me for how Leah could die. It wasn’t my fault, was it, that I had to watch her with Jen? Or that terrible pictures filled my head, one after another, when all I wanted was for them to go away?

They were so perfect, Leah and Jen, so liked, so likable. Jen, who actually was just another freaking teenager. The same as I was, but not the same. She lacked the cloud of reality that hung over me. “So lovely, so reliable, so loved by Leah”—words that crawled up the stairs and under my bedroom door every Saturday without fail. Only, upon reaching me, the letters had been rearranged, so that all I heard was how unreliable I was. How ugly, how hateful.

Cutting no longer helped. I had a disconnected feeling I couldn’t shake, a life that felt like someone else’s. When I caught my reflection in the mirror, it was someone else who looked back at me. Someone I didn’t know, with white skin and glittering eyes, from whom a power radiated out. I’d no idea what was happening to me.

A few times, the next step presented itself, dangled in front of me, daring me to be brave.

Take the step, Casey. . . . How close you are. How little it would take to cut harder, deeper, until you hit an artery. Orchestrate your own death....

Staring at my reflection, I watched the thought reflected in those glittering eyes, wondering how it would feel, whether the draining of blood from my body would bring the relief I craved, how long it would take for my life to ebb away. For me to die.

I floated the thought around in my head. And then something happened that changed the game completely. As I stood there, contemplating my end, staring at the face in the mirror, it smiled back at me, then turned away.