Authors: Ali Knight
The Silent Ones
Contents
Wink Murder
The First Cut
Until Death
Ali Knight has worked as a journalist and sub-editor at the BBC,
Guardian
and
Observer
and helped to launch some of the
Daily Mail
and
Evening Standard
’s most successful websites. Ali’s first novel,
Wink Murder
, was chosen as one of the
Independent
’s Books of the Year 2011. She lives with her family in London.
Visit Ali’s website to find out more about her and her psychological thrillers at
www.aliknight.co.uk
and follow her on Twitter
@aliknightauthor
.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Ali Knight 2015
The right of Ali Knight to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 9781444777161
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
For Stephen, Joseph, Luke and Isabel
Two hundred and fifty thousand children are reported missing in Europe every year.
1Source: the European Commission
May
2014
T
here were two guards in front of Olivia and her lawyer behind her, the sound of their hard civilian shoes clattering on the wipe-clean floor tiles. She swung her hands easily by her sides; there were no handcuffs, though she was sure this mother would expect them. They’d probably put them on her outside the door, just for show, to keep the mother calm, to stop her thinking she was having it easy in a high-security hospital rather than a prison. Mothers dispensed their moral outrage so cheaply.
Their little convoy paused outside a door as a guard fumbled for the right key. It amazed Olivia how clumsy people were. She suspected it was a reflection of their brains. She was the calmest here – none of them wanted this meeting to happen; one thing she’d learned over the years was that the prison system loved the status quo. Deviating from it upset everyone.
They entered the windowless room and she was made to sit on a chair fixed to the floor. Her lawyer took a seat next to her. A long blacked-out window on the wall to her right would have the hangers-on peering through; there was probably a crowd. Maybe she’d give them a show.
‘Upset her and your privileges will be withdrawn,’ said one of the guards who had walked down the corridor with her. Olivia didn’t bother to nod. ‘We’re ready,’ he said to no one in particular.
The door opposite her opened and a large black lawyer came in, followed by a small woman with a set mouth and dark hair. Her eyes met Olivia’s and the woman faltered in the doorway. Olivia noted with detachment that she had stopped breathing. Olivia smiled, spread her unchained hands wide, palms up. ‘Come on in, I won’t bite.’
The men in the room stiffened; the woman’s mouth gaped and then closed. Olivia turned to the window, already enjoying herself. The woman’s lawyer indicated that she should take a seat and sat down after her.
The mother was shrunken and shrivelled and old before her time, thin in the cheeks with tight lines migrating from upper lip to below her nose. She had her hands on the table. She shifted in her chair and looked straight at Olivia. ‘I’m Carly Evans’s mother. I wanted to ask you one last time to tell me where Carly is. So she can come back to us.’
She said it with pride. She was defiant. That got you nowhere, Olivia knew.
‘You talk about her as if she’s still alive.’
The black lawyer’s eyes bulged, the guard’s mouth dropped open a fraction, but the mother didn’t move.
‘I believe she is.’
Olivia grinned. ‘And what do I get for revealing this precious titbit?’
The lawyer found his voice. ‘You would get extra privileges, more time to attend courses, longer periods outside.’ He looked like he would rather be anywhere but here.
‘I have always felt myself a spiritual person,’ Mrs Evans said, and Olivia lost interest immediately and drifted off for a few seconds. Her own lawyer had grown old since she’d last seen him a few years ago; he’d lost his hair and presumably his wife too – she noted that the wedding band was gone.
‘Are you listening?’ the mother said, as if the bereaved should be offered special treatment. ‘I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying. I’m here today because I believe that despite what you’ve done, in your heart, you have feelings and you feel remorse.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because you’re a woman.’
Olivia’s grin was replaced by a flush of anger. She was being underestimated and that made her mad. She had been fighting against lazy stereotypes of female intuition and womanly feeling all her life, and this mother was revelling in them. The assumption that made her maddest was that to do what she had done she had to have been influenced by a man. In love or infatuated; that she was incapable of killing them by herself. That she needed the cruelty and strength of a man to kill a child.
She sat back slowly in her chair. ‘That I’m a woman seems to be important to you. I’ll tell you what’s important. I haven’t seen a bus for ten years. A river. I haven’t heard the sound of wind in the trees, feet kicking a stone, the crackle of a fire. And I never will again. I stare at these walls for fourteen hours a day. Yet I am freer than you will ever be. I lie in the gutter, but I am looking at the stars.’
Mrs Evans frowned. ‘I have it in my heart to forgive. Please, tell me where my daughter is.’
Olivia grinned. This was priceless! They might as well be in Scandinavia for all the liberal tosh that was being thrown around. She had often wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to have been born in Texas. They would have shoved the lethal stuff in her veins a decade ago. It would have spared her the mewling. ‘Mrs Evans, you’re going to have to try a lot, lot harder than that.’
She saw the tears brim in the mother’s eyes. ‘Please, God, I beg you.’ Olivia felt the pleasure of power flush through her body. It felt as pure and sharp as freedom. ‘Make it end, for me and the other families. We have weapons we can use to—’
Olivia laughed. ‘Do you know the most powerful weapon in the world, Mrs Evans? This.’ She stuck out her tongue and wiggled it. ‘A woman’s weapon, isn’t it? I bet your husband’s thought that over the years, your lawyer too. A tongue-lashing from a woman is a terrible thing. They say words can’t hurt you, but we know that’s not true. They hurt more than the sharpest tools, they can cast you into a pit of despair, or deliver you to ecstasy.’
‘Just tell me and put me out of this misery!’ The mother’s voice had risen to a wail.
‘That’s enough.’ The woman’s lawyer stood up sharply, his chair scraping back noisily on the floor. ‘This is achieving nothing. It’s time to go.’
Mrs Evans didn’t move, staring at Olivia helplessly. She needed the strong arm of her lawyer to get her out of the seat and out of the door.
Olivia liked having power. There was power in holding a secret, and she was going to keep it.
Three Weeks Later
D
arren stood in the living room doorway, trying to block out his mother’s voice from behind him in the hallway. ‘Take him for a walk, otherwise he’ll bark all night and the neighbours have suffered enough. Darren!’
‘In a minute, Mum.’ Dad was watching golf in what must have been America, the course so green it was blinding, the sky Georgia blue. He’d seen a paint colour on a chart called that once, and had used it in a painting a few months ago. He didn’t understand golf and couldn’t see the attraction. He could never see the ball when they teed off, the camera swinging wildly to capture nothing except that Georgia blue. He began counting the beer cans on the table in front of Dad. Too many for this time of day.
‘Darren, the dog.’
There was a ripple of applause onscreen from a lot of square, middle-aged men in baseball caps and oversized shorts.
‘Darren!’
Her voice was loud enough to force him to begin moving.
‘OK, OK.’ He turned lazily to see Chester staring up at him, tail wagging.