Into the Water(96)

Things were quieter in her head, too. Jeannie wasn’t talking as loudly as she used to, and when she did, it was more of a chat, less of a tirade. These days, Nickie found she spent less time sitting at the window looking out and more time in bed. She felt very tired and her legs ached more than ever.

In the morning, she was going to Spain, for two weeks in the sunshine. Rest and recreation, that was what she needed. The money came as a surprise: ten thousand pounds from Nel Abbott’s estate, left to one Nicola Sage of Marsh Street, Beckford. Whoever would have thought it? But then perhaps Nickie shouldn’t have been surprised, because Nel was really the only one who’d ever listened. Poor soul! Much good it did her.





Erin


I WENT BACK just before Christmas. I can’t really say why, except that I’d dreamed about the river almost every night, and I thought a trip to Beckford might exorcize the demon.

I left the car by the church and walked north from the pool, up the cliff, past a few bunches of flowers dying in cellophane. I walked all the way to the cottage. It was hunched and miserable, with its curtains drawn and red paint splashed on the door. I tried the handle, but it was locked, so I turned and crunched down over the frosted grass to the river, which was pale blue and silent, mist rising off it like a ghost. My breath hung white in the air in front of me, my ears ached with the cold. Should have worn a hat.

I came to the river because there was nowhere else to go, and no one to talk to. The person I really wanted to speak to was Sean, but I couldn’t find him. I was told he’d moved to a place called Pity Me in County Durham – it sounds made up, but it isn’t. The town is there, but he wasn’t. The address I was given turned out to be an empty house with a TO LET sign outside. I even contacted HMP Frankland, which is where Patrick will see out the rest of his days, but they said the old man hadn’t had a single visitor since his arrival.

I wanted to ask Sean for the truth. I thought he might tell me, now he’s no longer with the police. I thought he might be able to explain how he’d lived the life he did and whether, when he was supposedly investigating Nel’s death, he’d known about his father all along. It wouldn’t be such a stretch. He’d been protecting his father all his life, after all.

The river itself offered no answers. When, a month back, a fisherman dug a mobile phone out of the mud in which his wellington boots were planted, I had hope. But Nel Abbott’s phone told us nothing we hadn’t already gleaned from her phone records. If there were damning photographs, images that would explain all that was left unexplained, we had no way of accessing them – the phone wouldn’t even turn on, it was dead, its insides clogged and corroded by silt and water.

After Sean left, there was a mountain of paperwork to get through, an inquiry, questions asked and left unanswered over what Sean knew and when, and why the fuck the whole thing had been handled as badly as it had. And not just Nel’s case, but Henderson’s, too: how was it that he was able to disappear without trace from under our noses?

As for me, I just went over and over that last interview with Patrick, the story he told. Nel’s bracelet torn from her wrist, Patrick grabbing her arm. The struggle they’d had up there on the cliff before he pushed her. But there had been no bruises in the places where he said he had grabbed her, no marks on her wrist where he’d torn off that bracelet, no signs of any struggle whatsoever. And the clasp on the bracelet was unbroken.

I did point all of this out at the time, but after everything that had happened, after Patrick’s confession and Sean’s resignation and all the general arse-covering and buck-passing, no one was really in the mood to listen.

I sat by the river and I felt as I’d been feeling for a while: that all this, Nel’s story and Lauren’s and Katie’s too, it was all incomplete, unfinished. I never really saw all there was to see.





Helen


HELEN HAD AN aunt who lived outside Pity Me, just north of Durham. She had a farm, and Helen could remember visiting one summer, feeding donkeys with bits of carrot and picking blackberries in the hedgerows. The aunt was no longer there; Helen wasn’t sure about the farm. The town was shabbier and poorer than she’d remembered and there were no donkeys to be seen, but it was small and anonymous and no one paid her any mind.

She’d found herself a job for which she was overqualified, and a small ground-floor flat with a patio at the back. It got the sun in the afternoon. When they first got to the town, they rented a house, but that only lasted a matter of weeks and then she woke up one morning and Sean was gone, so she gave the keys back to the landlord and started looking again.

She hadn’t tried to call him. She knew he wasn’t coming back. Their family was broken, it was always going to break without Patrick, he was the glue that held them together.

Her heart, too, was shattered in ways she didn’t like to think about. She hadn’t been to visit Patrick. She knew she shouldn’t even feel sorry for him – he had admitted killing his wife, murdering Nel Abbott in cold blood.

Not cold blood, no. That’s not right. Helen understood that Patrick saw things in very black and white terms, and that he believed, genuinely believed, that Nel Abbott was a threat to their family, to their togetherness. She was. And so he acted. He did it for Sean, and he did it for her. That’s not so cold-blooded, is it?

But every night she had the same nightmare: Patrick holding her tabby under the water. In the dream, his eyes were sealed shut but the cat’s were open, and when the struggling animal twisted its heard around towards her, she saw that its eyes were bright green, just like Nel Abbott’s.