Hold Your Breath (8 page)

Tara’s sobs came from deep inside, wracking her body with spasms of pain and guilt.

She cried hard for some time. Eventually, exhausted and shivering, she pulled the pale green throw that covered her duvet around her arms and stared up at the ceiling with throbbing eyes.

As always, she began to torture herself by remembering how she’d stared up at the entrance to the police station that day. It was like pressing on a painful bruise. She imagined an
alternative reality in which she simply turned around and walked away. There was a kind of agonising bliss in picturing this. How she wished she could go back and make it happen.

But she hadn’t done that. Instead, she had gone inside and somehow persuaded them to listen to her.

Tara had heard that the three year old had gone missing a few weeks into the spring term. Tyler Evans was the brother of a girl in the year below her, Chelsea. Everyone had been talking about it
in class. Tara knew where the family lived; the address was a few streets away from her.

When she’d passed the house on her way home from school, she’d seen a scrum of reporters already forming around the small, neat garden at the front. Outside the garden was one of
those yellow bubble cars, the sort every small child in Britain seemed to own. Tara’s fingertips brushed across it and then she’d started to go a bit dizzy.

The pictures came, stronger than they had ever been about lost keys or jewellery. So strong they hurt her head and made her feel sick.

A stone angel towered over her, eyes blank and uncaring. Gravestones and statues crowding in. A terrible, hollow
feeling of fear only helped by the rough, comforting sensation of a
grubby toy pig in her hand.

Tara had staggered away, trying to process what she’d just seen. It was Tyler. She knew this deep in her bones. He was in some sort of . . . graveyard?

She didn’t tell anyone. It was too weird. But she spent a whole night tossing and turning as the images bombarded her mind. She told Mum she was sick the next day and as soon as the house
was quiet, she’d dressed with shaking hands and walked to the police station.

They hadn’t wanted to listen to her at first but then Siobhan Evans was in the station and overheard what was going on. Digging her long nails into Tara’s shoulders, she’d made
her repeat what she’d just said.

It was Tara’s description of the toy that swung opinion towards believing her. No one else knew that Tyler’s beloved Piggy was missing too. Siobhan’s excitement and insistence
that Tara’s hunch be investigated made the police act. They had no other information and even though it was obvious the officers Tara met were deeply dubious about this, Siobhan made a scene
about the consequences of them ignoring potentially vital information.

So Tara was forced to describe every tiny detail of her images all over again, to several different police officers. Siobhan made Tara hold a baby photo of Tyler on a keyring and more images had
come so violently, and in such bright detail, that Tara had retched and almost been sick on the floor of the police station. The images of the statues were so powerful, everyone agreed he must be
close to a graveyard. There was a huge cemetery nearby, which served a ten-mile radius. It seemed the obvious place. A massive fingertip search was carried out there, involving police and the many
locals who had come out to help.

But there was no sign of Tyler.

Then Siobhan had remembered an old boyfriend who lived next door to a large church in a village about twenty miles away. They’d split under acrimonious circumstances and although Siobhan
had no reason to believe the man would take Tyler, there had been threats made during their final, heated row, which implicated him.

The police went in hard, battering down the door and dragging Sean Stanley from where he’d been sleeping off a drinking bender. Already known to police for petty crime, Stanley’d
suffered injuries in the police’s handling of him.

But Tyler hadn’t been there.

As everyone soon discovered, he’d been lying near to his home at the bottom of the steep bank that led to the railway line. An area the police said had already been thoroughly searched.
Although obviously not thoroughly enough.

Tara felt about a hundred years old as she wearily began to pack away the cuttings and the letter.

Of course she
hadn’t
killed that little boy. His injuries had killed him. And maybe, as her mother had tearfully pointed out many times since, if Siobhan Evans had kept more of an
eye on her small son in the first place, it would never have happened.

But it felt like Tara’s fault. She couldn’t explain what had happened, despite the long tearful hours trying to do just that with Mum and Dad afterwards. She’d been sure, that
was all. So sure. And so wrong.

The story would have had more prominence in the national news had it not been for a unique set of circumstances that week: the suicide of a cabinet minister and a massive terrorist attack in
France. A perfect storm of bad news.

But it wasn’t a big town and it didn’t take long for people to find out locally.

There was no need for Siobhan Evans to tell her she’d never be forgiven.

Tara was never going to forgive herself.

T
he next day at school, Tara was conscious of Melodie Stone’s purse in her bag. It felt like it was giving off some kind of radioactive glow.
She’d stuffed it hastily into an A4 envelope that morning, and the brief few moments of contact had caused a spasm of pain to shoot through her head. She didn’t want to touch it any
more than she had to. It was impossible to ignore the thing. Every time she went in her bag to get a book, a tissue or her purse, the bulging envelope seemed to demand her attention.

She found herself next to Karis during food technology, washing up some stuff that Mrs Marchment had used in a demonstration. They worked in silence. Tara kept wrestling with the decision to
tell Karis about her conversation with Will. Maybe she could take the flipping purse there instead. But something stopped her every time she formed the words. She didn’t want to have to
explain how she’d come into contact with Will, in case it meant divulging that she’d been to the lido to find Leo.

So she held back. She wasn’t intending to speak at all, but it was Karis who suddenly broke the silence.

‘Why did you ask about Mel the other day?’ she said.

Tara’s breath caught.

‘I mean, why wouldn’t she be okay in Brighton?’ Karis was watching Tara intently, her hazel eyes narrowed.

Tara shrugged. ‘You lot were all wailing so much about how sudden it was, that was all,’ she said.

Karis sniffed and glanced over to where Jada and co were huddled, giggling over something on Chloe’s BlackBerry. Tara followed her gaze. It suddenly struck her that she hadn’t seen
Karis hanging out with that group for a few days.

‘
I
wasn’t wailing, actually,’ said Karis.

‘Whatever,’ said Tara, rinsing off a wooden spoon, which was nobbled and sticky with pastry mix, under the hot tap.

‘It is a bit strange, though,’ said Karis in a rush.

Tara stopped what she was doing to meet her eyes.

‘I mean, the fact that her phone isn’t working any more,’ said Karis. ‘Why would she just leave so suddenly? She doesn’t even like her dad.’

Tara stared at her. Why did everyone think
she
was the person to discuss this with?

‘Why are you telling me?’ she said irritably. ‘Can’t you share it with your coven over there?’ She was surprised at her own daring. Impressed with herself a bit
too. She tried to avoid attention and trouble generally. She didn’t need any more battles in her life. But Karis didn’t turn on her, as she might have expected. Instead she gave a deep
sigh. Her hair fell across her face as she wiped in a desultory way at a scuffed plastic chopping board.

‘Coven’s about right,’ she said. They didn’t speak for a couple more minutes.

‘So how’s that gorgeous brother of yours then?’ said Karis, flashing a lascivious grin at Tara.

‘Trust me,’ said Tara, ‘you wouldn’t think he was gorgeous if you had to use the bath after him. He’s so hairy, it’s like a gorilla’s been grooming
itself in there.’

Karis snorted with laughter – a proper, likeable snort – that made Tara grin back at her.

‘And,’ she added, warming to the theme, ‘when he’s going out, he checks his reflection in anything remotely shiny. I swear I saw him admiring himself in the kettle
before. And the screen of his phone. He checks his hair way more than I do.’

Karis was helpless with laughter now and Tara felt a giggle rumble up from her belly. She wasn’t being disloyal to Beck. She just saw a different side to him than other girls, being his
sister. Anyway, he could handle it. The laughter felt like internal sunshine.

A dark and then a blond head turned their way from across the room. She gave Jada the sweetest smile she could muster.

On the way home from school Tara had a feeling of lightness inside. She wasn’t exactly friends with Karis, but at least for once she’d had a bit of a laugh with
someone here.

It reminded her of her old life, before they moved. Before everything happened, more accurately.

She hadn’t ever been one of the popular girls, but she’d done okay. She’d been mates with Mahlia since primary school. They’d gone through everything together; starting
secondary school, spots and periods, boys and exams. But she’d moved away too, to Scotland, a few months before things kicked off. Even though they texted and emailed, it was hard to stay
friends when you didn’t see people, plus Mahlia had changed. She’d gone all active for the first time ever and threw in mentions in her emails and texts of weird stuff like water-skiing
on lochs.

Anyway, today had been the best day in a while. It was nice to feel like a normal girl for once.

Tara decided to walk along by the river, which was a slight detour, but more scenic than going by the main road. She walked along, noticing the weeping willow that bowed delicate fronds over the
water on the other bank. A wood pigeon cooed gently somewhere above her. The trees were perfectly mirrored in the still water today and she passed a houseboat that sent blue and red splashes onto
the murky green of the water. A large woman with grey dreadlocks was watering the plants that tumbled from stone pots on the boat roof. She swayed slightly to the languid thump of reggae music
drifting from an ancient speaker on the deck. Seeing Tara, she smiled. Tara gave her a warm smile back.

As Tara walked a little further, houses began to come into view on the opposite bank.

Within a few moments she saw the iron bridge, and groaned. She’d somehow managed to forget about the purse for a little while, but now it looked as though dropping it off would be so easy,
it’d be downright mean not to do it.

She put her hand into her bag and fished out the large envelope. It was looking a bit dog-eared after being scrunched up in there all day. In fact, something had leaked in her make-up bag, and
there was a sticky pink mark on the top corner. Tara tried to smear it away with the side of her hand.

She looked up again. The houses were three storeys high, and painted white. They looked grand and elegant. Some had carefully landscaped gardens, which led in neat, green steps down to the
water, with decking or vast conservatories that gleamed in the sunlight.

One of the houses a bit further along stood out like a broken tooth in a Hollywood smile. Even from this distance Tara could see the blankets pinned up at windows instead of curtains. The back
garden was a tangled jungle of brambles and nettles. A giant plastic sunflower on a stick was poking out of the low fence, where it twirled in the breeze. There was an odd tinkling sound coming
from that direction and Tara spotted several sets of metal wind chimes hanging from a gnarled old fruit tree in the garden. The house looked shabby and neglected. Tara quickly ruled this out as
Melodie’s house. Someone like her
definitely
didn’t live somewhere like this. She always wore really fashionable stuff and her hair couldn’t be cheap to maintain either,
Tara thought.

But when she crossed the bridge, she found she wasn’t on the road she needed after all. This one curved in the opposite direction to the houses. She had to ask directions in a
florist’s and the road she was looking for turned out to be several streets over.

Her good mood had totally evaporated now. She was eager to get this pointless exercise over and done with so she could go home. Then she’d text Will. She’d say she didn’t want
anything further to do with it. Melodie Stone was probably having a lovely time in Brighton with everything money could buy, being a complete bitch to a whole new set of people.

It seemed ages before Tara found herself at the top of a cul-de-sac called Riverdale Rise. She made her way down towards the river to the number Will had written down – ten. It was only
when she got to number eight that she realised the house she wanted
was
the shabby one she’d seen from the back.

Well . . . that’s a bit of a turn-up
, she thought.

There was a small front garden surrounded by tall railings with white paint peeling off them to reveal patches of dark rust. An old bike, missing a saddle, was propped up against the railings.
An open bin bag filled with empty wine bottles sagged next to an old dressmaking dummy wearing a greasy-looking baseball hat. The stained grey torso looked eerily like a body half slumped there.
Two white lion statues adorned the end pieces of the stone steps. One was missing a head; the other had a bit of bedraggled tinsel tied limply round its neck. Its nose was chipped off, like it had
been in a fight.

Tara looked up at the house which, despite all the rubbish garlanded around it, was about four times grander than her own. A pane of glass was broken in the big bay window on the first floor,
where a circular dream catcher with faded feathers hung down inside. Paint peeled on the rotten, wooden window frames. Tara glanced at the house on the other side, which had pristine windows
showing swagged silky curtains. As she turned her gaze back to number ten, she thought she saw a movement at the window, but it was too fast for her to be sure.