The Girls (25 page)

‘Live here? Well, yes and no. It’s my flat. I own it—’

‘You own half of it, Gordon.’

‘OK, OK. Half of it. Yes. But currently I am
residing
here with my son and his family while I recover from my operation and get used to this thing.’

‘Talking of which, Gordon,’ said his physio, ‘we’ve still got another ten minutes.’ She tapped her watch.

Gordon sighed and pulled himself heavily to his feet. ‘Love you and leave you,’ he muttered before hobbling to the kitchen door.

‘Were you here, sir?’ said the PC. ‘On Saturday night?’

‘Yes, I most certainly was.’

‘In which case, sir, I wonder if it would be possible to speak to you later on, when we come back to talk to the rest of the family?’

‘Nothing to hide, be delighted to.’

‘That’s great, sir. Thank you. I’ll see you this evening.’

After he’d gone, PC Michaelides turned to Adele and smiled. ‘Quite a character,’ he said.

‘You could say that.’

‘Anyway. I’ve taken up way too much of your time already today. Forgive me. I’ll be around the area if you think of anything else. If anything occurs to you. I’m off to see …’ He leafed through his notebook. ‘… Fiona Maxwell-Reid now. Dylan’s mum. She lives upstairs from you, I believe?’

‘Yes,’ said Adele, smoothing down the skirt of her summer dress. ‘But I’m not sure you’ll get much out of her. She’s very introverted. Keeps herself to herself. She doesn’t get involved in stuff in the garden. Or anywhere else for that matter.’

‘Well, thank you for the warning. I’ll see what I can do.’ He stood in the doorway, looked upwards at the top floors of the house. Then he looked back at Adele and smiled. ‘See you later.’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘see you later.’

‘Gordon,’ Adele said, finding him a moment later emerging from the bathroom with a crumpled newspaper in his hand and his fly not quite done up properly. Something had occurred to her while Gordon was chatting with the PC about his foot. Something she’d almost but not quite said, because she’d realised as the words had hovered at the tip of her tongue that once it was said it could not be unsaid.

‘Yes, Mrs H. What can I do for you?’

‘Just wondering: when you were undergoing surgery – you know, before and after – did you have any trouble sleeping?’

‘Dear God, did I ever. You try sleeping with an open wound for a foot.’

‘And did they give you anything? To help you sleep?’

‘Sweeties, you mean?’

‘Well, yes. Sleeping pills.’

‘I should say they did. Jesus Christ.’

‘And do you have any left?’

‘Oh, dear girl’ – his face lit up – ‘don’t tell me the old hippy-dippy magic potions aren’t working? You’ll be telling me you think the children should go to proper school and be taught by proper teachers next. Heh heh.’ He squeezed her hand conspiratorially. ‘Leave it with me, Mrs H. I’ll be right back.’

She watched him hobble down the hallway towards his room.

‘Thin end of the wedge!’ he shouted joyfully over his shoulder. ‘It’ll be microwave chips for tea next! Heh heh.’

She chewed at the inside of her cheek while she waited for him. It seemed to take him a long time and the longer it took him, the more she chewed her cheek, pressing the flesh closer to her teeth with the tip of her index finger.
Come on, Gordon
, she chanted under her breath,
come on
.

Finally he appeared, looking flustered and confused. In the palm of his hand he held out two small blue and white pills. ‘Mrs H.,’ he said, solemnly. ‘We appear to have a problem. Last time I looked I had half a fucking pot of these things. Now I’ve got two.’ He paused, jiggling the pills in the palm of his hand. ‘Someone’, he said at last, ‘has been stealing my sweeties.’

‘Well,’ said Jo Mackie, snapping off her rubber gloves a while later. ‘No sign of any trauma or injury. The hymen is intact.’

Clare felt an overwhelming upsurge of relief pass through her. She reached behind her to find the wall.

‘No bruising. No scratches. I’ve taken a swab but I think it’s safe to say that Grace has not been raped, vaginally or anally. Also, your younger daughter mentioned that Grace’s top had been pulled up. So I’ve examined the breasts for trauma but there are no signs of anything. And I’ve taken swabs from that area.’

An image passed through Clare’s mind so terrible that she needed to blink several times to dislodge it.

‘And also from inside her mouth. Now, unfortunately, because of the time that has elapsed since your daughter was attacked, it’s possible that any sperm traces in the mouth may have been destroyed by salivary enzymes. But we might get lucky. It’s not been quite two days yet and I’ll take these swabs myself to the lab and wait with the technician. We’ll move everything along superfast.’

Clare blinked again. Sperm. On her daughter. In her daughter. No.

‘Is that likely?’ she said. ‘I mean – in these cases. Is that what happens?’

Jo Mackie smiled at her. ‘Anything can happen, Clare. But, hopefully, given the lack of any other signs of sexual assault, it didn’t happen in this case. I’m really just going through the tick list.’

Clare felt a small hurt of hope inside her heart. A tick list. No sperm. Just a tick list.

‘So.’ Jo Mackie clipped down the lid of a metal case that she’d filled with swabs and samples. ‘I should have some news for you in a few hours. Or, better still, no news at all. But either way, I’ll be back.’

‘OK. Thank you.’

‘And in the meantime, off you go.’ She held open the door of the small office they’d been talking in, a quiet smile on her face.

Clare looked at her questioningly.

‘You can see her now.’

‘I can?’

‘Yes. I asked the nurse in charge. She said it’s fine now.’

‘Oh.’ Clare touched her heart. She hadn’t seen her daughter for thirty-six hours. ‘Can I take my other daughter in? Do you think?’

‘Maybe just you for now,’ she said. ‘Get used to it. Make yourself strong first.
Right
.’ She picked up the metal case. ‘I need to run. I’ll see you later.’

She watched Jo Mackie leaving with her box full of bits of her child’s DNA and then she headed towards the intensive-care ward, her breath held tight inside her lungs.

Grace was beautiful in her repose. The bruises to her face, bruises Clare could barely remember from the night they’d been inflicted, had faded to early evening storm-clouds. Her skin was not broken. Clare wondered where all the blood had come from. A small hump on the bridge of her nose led to her to conclude it had been a simple nosebleed. She remembered the thoughts of brain damage, of internal bleeding, of ineradicable facial scarring that had spun around her head in the back of the ambulance. Before the test results had come through she’d thought, crazily, that Grace had fallen out of a tree.

Out of a tree!

Like a plucky, foolhardy kid!

She’d thought that her daughter was still a little girl.

She looked strangely adult now lying here with her chalky skin, her unmade-up face. Clare thanked the nurse who had silently passed her a cup of water. She rested the cup on the bedside table and reached out for Grace’s hand. ‘Is it OK’, she said, ‘if I touch her?’

‘Of course,’ the nurse said kindly. ‘And do talk to her. She’ll like to hear the sound of your voice.’

‘Will she?’

She thought of Chris and herself talking to her pregnant bump. Someone had told them to do that. Told them that it meant that when the baby was born it would immediately recognise its parents’ voices. That that would be a good thing. It had seemed an abstract concept at the time, pregnant with her first child, no possible notion of what a parent–child bond would feel like in reality as opposed to in theory. And now that person who’d been hidden away inside her body was hidden away inside her own head and once more she was being asked to talk to someone who couldn’t hear her, being asked to accept and act upon an abstract notion.

How could it be possible, Clare thought, that she knew so little about a person she’d once grown inside her? A person who had taken milk from her body and slept on her shoulder? Who had, at one stage, given her a bullet-pointed rundown every day of what she’d done at school, missing out not one detail? And now, for all Clare knew, she might have been abused, her body might have been violated.

She took Grace’s hand. It was warm and pulsed with life. ‘Hello, my baby girl,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t seen you for so long. They wouldn’t let me. But I’ve been here the whole time. Me. And your sister. We’ve both been here. And all the news is good so far. Your head hasn’t been hurt. And a nice lady just came to look at some other parts of you and she says those haven’t been hurt either. I hope you didn’t mind her coming to look at you? Anyway, your face looks fine. No scars. Just some bruises. And we’re all just waiting for you to wake up now, baby girl. Wake up and tell us what happened.’

She squeezed Grace’s hand, tenderly. Rubbed her thumb up and down the back of it. Turned it over and traced a circle on the palm of her hand with her fingertip.

Round and round the garden, like a teddy bear
.

How Grace had loved that game.

She tried to think of something else to say. But she couldn’t. All she could think, suddenly and fiercely, was:
Chris, I need you.

Twenty-six

The flat had the slightly awkward air that homes often have when one returns after some time away: an uncomfortable loss of familiarity.

Clare went straight to her room to pack.

Pip meanwhile wandered from room to room, trying to find her way back into the flat. There were still hints of Grace’s party here and there. The balloons tied to the garden chairs bobbed in and out of view through the back window; her cards sat on display on the dining table along with her presents. Pip touched things gently as she passed them, trying to assimilate them into herself. She heard her mum going through the wardrobe in her room, the jangle of her coat hangers knocking together. ‘Choose yourself a fresh outfit, Pip,’ her mum called out to her. ‘And a spare for me to pack. And be quick! Really quick!’

She went into her own room. Here were the loudest suggestions of the hours before Saturday night. Grace’s original outfit discarded to the floor where she’d changed into her new clothes. Her make-up piled on the floor around the mirror. The wrapping paper from Dylan’s gift to her. The one she’d squirrelled away in here, not wanting to open it in front of the others. Pip went through the room, trying to find the gift, wondering if it contained a clue as to what had happened to her. But there was nothing, just the gift tag upon which he’d written:

Like thirteen was really old or something. Like thirteen meant something.

She went into the kitchen and peered through the window. It half amazed her to see people out there. Just getting on with their lives.

‘Pip! Hurry up!’

She could see Catkin out there. She was reading. For a moment Pip was tempted to stride out there and shout into Catkin’s face:
How can you sit there reading a book when my sister’s in a coma and it was probably
your
weird father who put her into it?

She looked away from Catkin and towards the block at the top of the garden, squinting to see if she could make out the form of Rhea sitting on her balcony. But there was no one there. Then she looked up at the tiny pinprick eyes of the attic flat above the Howeses. Was Dylan in there? Had he taken the day off school in the aftermath of his ‘girlfriend’ being in a coma? Or was he at school mucking about with his posh mates as if today was just a normal day? Did he even care?

And then she looked right, towards Tyler’s block of flats. Tyler with her scratched-up arms and her hard-girl façade. What did she know about Leo? About Grace?

‘Pip! Come on, darling, we need to get back to the hospital. Grace might be waking up!’

Pip was about to turn and join her mother in the hallway when she saw a flash of red hair, a streak of milky leg, a blaze of orange fluorescence as a ball arced across the garden.

Max
.

She ran across the lawn, catching him by the walls of the Secret Garden where he was leaning to pick up his ball. He saw her and immediately walked away.

‘Max,’ she said, sharply, because in this new disordered world of hers, sharp was something she was allowed to be.

He pretended not to hear.

‘Max,’ she said, louder. She caught up to him and grabbed his arm.

He shook his arm free of her hold and looked at her crossly. ‘What?’

‘You know what,’ she said.

‘I don’t know anything.’

‘You do. When I saw you on the hill – you’d seen something. You know you had. What was it?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see anything. Just your sister. Like that.’

‘So,’ she said, ‘why didn’t you get help? Why didn’t you do something?’

‘I was going to,’ he said. ‘I was going to. And then you came.’

Pip narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Did you see Leo?’

‘What?’

‘Leo. The girls’ dad? Did you see him?’

He looked at her incredulously. ‘No-oo.’