Cross Her Heart(67)

‘The thing I don’t get,’ Marilyn says, ‘is why. Why would she do this? Is it something to do with Daniel?’

I’ve heard his name so many times recently, on the news, from the police, and yet still it’s like a punch to my gut. ‘I killed Daniel,’ I say softly, as if the quieter I speak, the less dead my little brother might become. ‘I wish I could say I didn’t, but I can still feel my hands around his throat.’ A flash of memory. Surreal. My thumping head, then and now. ‘I can’t talk about it.’

‘And I don’t want to talk about it, but if it’s not that, what is her problem? All this must have taken planning. Finding you, killing your ex, setting you up. She didn’t go to prison. She was free. So why does she hate you so much?’

I stare out at the darkness as rain smears the window.

‘Because she loves me. And she can’t forgive me for what I did.’

‘Daniel?’

I half-laugh. A sorry, sad sound trapped in the past. ‘No. After Daniel.’

I don’t look at her, but I can feel her expectation.

‘There was an anonymous call to the police that day. From a phone box down by the train station. Said two girls had taken a little boy into a derelict house on Coombs Street.’ You’ve got to hurry. I think summat bad has happened. He was crying and then he stopped. I think that Charlotte Nevill was one of ’em. ‘Said he was hurt.’

‘And?’

‘I made the call. It was me. I reported us.’ My throat is burning and tight. ‘I broke the deal.’





54


HER

Ava, if you keep crying you’re going to drown in your own snot. I’m not taking the tape off. Not till it’s food time. Jesus. I need you alive until Charlotte gets here. She’s expecting you alive and one of us isn’t a cheat. Unless the police catch her, then it’s all over. But you know what? I actually think she’ll make it. She’s surprising us both, isn’t she? So, for God’s sake, stop snivelling.

Your mother, she never cried. Not after. Not before. Not even when old Mrs Jackson, nervous and trembling, took the stand in court and told what she’d seen through the broken window of our den on Coombs Street. How she’d been going home across the wasteland and heard a screech and then seen Charlotte hitting little Daniel with the brick. Charlotte didn’t even flinch at the details being replayed. I always admired that about her. You could do with channelling some of those genes. Being a little more like her. I wonder how she feels, seeing herself all over the news again. Famous. Girl A – the star of the show, Girl B – totally forgotten. Clyde without Bonnie. Even she forgot me. When she told. She didn’t think for a second how it would be for me. We were supposed to run away together. Start a new life. Be free. She got freedom of sorts. Yes, she got locked up, but she got what she wanted. Daniel was gone and she was away from her family. Eight easy years later and boom, she’s out on the streets a whole new person.

My sentence was longer and far worse. There are different kinds of prisons, trust me. You never met my mother. She was bad enough before. Inventing illnesses for me I didn’t have so she could worry and over-protect me. The hoops I had to jump through to get out of the house to see Charlotte. All her neuroses foisted on to me. But after? It’s funny, people think acquitted means you walk free and that’s it. Girl B disappears into a sunlit future. What a load of bullshit.

There was court-ordered therapy. Years of it. Talking, talking, talking, and no matter how often I told them what they wanted to hear, there were more questions. Unpicking me, unpicking Charlotte. So much to remember. Lies are so much harder to embed in your head than truths, even for me, smart as I am. For a while, I just withdrew. Played the simpleton who’d served me so well. And it worked for the therapists, but it backfired into my life.

Sweet, simple, easily led Katie. Mother wouldn’t let me go to school, of course not. What if I met another girl like Charlotte Nevill? So there were home tutors, specialist teachers, always with her sitting in. I had to keep playing dumb, of course, if I ever wanted the therapists to go away. So I didn’t pass my exams – not well enough to go to university, and that was that. Life over. I was trapped. The little girl who never left home. Poor, fragile Katie Batten.

I knew I’d find Charlotte again after the news of her release broke. All I had to do was wait. I’d got used to waiting. I’d had to wait all those years for my mother to die, after all. People always leave a trail, and Charlotte was nothing if not impulsive. She’d make a mistake – threaten her new identity somehow – and I’d be watching.

She must have known I’d come back. I wonder if she ever believed – truly believed – I was dead? Our story couldn’t end that way. Not apart. There was always going to have to be a reckoning, you see.

I thought she loved me. I thought she was my best friend. And we made a deal. We crossed our hearts and hoped to die and we sealed it with a kiss. We were going to be together forever.

Deals like that cannot be broken.





55


BEFORE


1989

It’s the bleakest of days.

Rain falls, big heavy drops that splash inside their den from the roof with all its slates torn away, and run down the outside walls where the guttering has gone. The wasteland has turned to a sludgy mud of broken bricks and dirt and forgotten things, and their shoes are now caked in it. A rotten damp smell fills the room, and even with vodka and half of one of her ma’s pills inside Charlotte, the blackness of the future can’t be lifted. Not for her and not for Katie.