The Lies We Told(72)

‘Jesus fucking Christ! And you didn’t think to tell me about it? You didn’t think I had a right to know about the nutcase who was hanging around me?’

Oliver hung his head. ‘We paid her a lot of money. Thousands and thousands of pounds to leave you alone. She was broke, homeless, a drifter, she’d … been in a lot of trouble throughout her life, drugs, prison …’

‘Prison?’ Clara asked.

‘We paid her the money and it worked. We didn’t hear from her for ten years. I hired a private detective to track her down, keep an eye on her. Her life … it spiralled, she was a junkie, a prostitute, constantly in trouble with the police. She was in no fit state to continue to wage her war against us, so she left us in peace for a time.’

Clara couldn’t keep quiet any longer. ‘This is your daughter. Your daughter! As much your flesh and blood as Emily! Didn’t you care? Didn’t you feel any guilt, any responsibility for this woman? Jesus, Oliver! I can’t believe what I’m hearing!’ Oliver kept his head bent, unable to meet her gaze. She felt a burning dislike for him.

‘But why after ten years did she get it together to go after Luke?’ Mac asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense. Why now?’

Rose shook her head. ‘We don’t know.’

Tom drained his glass of wine. ‘When did you guess that Hannah was behind Luke’s disappearance?’ he asked.

Oliver glanced at him. ‘Hannah sent us a picture of him, saying he was with her. She said that she wanted more money, that if we didn’t give it to her, she’d hurt him. So we gave her what she asked for, then she said it wasn’t enough. She said if we paid her more she’d let Luke go. We’ve been going out of our minds, Tom. We know it’s not money she wants, she wants to torture us, this is her revenge, that’s why she’s keeping it going, the longer she can cause us pain, the better she likes it.’

‘Why didn’t you tell the police?’ Tom asked next. ‘Surely that was the first thing you should have done?’

‘We didn’t dare!’ Rose said. ‘She seems to know everything about us. Every move we make – when we speak to the police, what we talk about with them, our conversations or meetings with Clara, you name it, she somehow knows about it. We couldn’t work out how she was doing it, even if we used public telephones, she’d know what we talked about, it’s terrifying. She said if we told the police about her, she’d know and she’d kill Luke immediately. We couldn’t take that risk. And then …’ her voice faltered and she took a gulping breath. ‘And then she sent us pictures of Luke, to warn us what would happen if we did.’

‘Pictures?’ Clara asked, feeling sick. ‘What pictures?’

Oliver pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘This is the last one that Hannah sent us.’

‘Let me see that.’ Tom’s face drained of colour as he took the phone from his father and stared down at its screen. Wordlessly he passed it to Clara. It was a picture of Luke. He had a large and vivid bruise across his face, a split lip, and his skin behind his scars was horribly pale, his eyes staring glassily at the lens.

Clara gasped in horror as she swiped to the next photo. It showed Luke’s bound arms, covered in hundreds of small, weeping knife wounds. ‘Oh no,’ she whispered, ‘oh God.’

‘We’ve been waiting to hear from her, to tell us what to do next,’ Rose said. ‘We’re so frightened.’ Fresh tears fell from her eyes. ‘She’s dangerous, Tom. She’s so very dangerous.’

A coldness spread through Clara. ‘How dangerous?’ She looked at Oliver. ‘When you said she went to prison, what was it for?’





28


Cambridgeshire, 1997

They say that personality disorders, including sociopathy, can come about due to a mixture of biology and circumstance. A neurological malfunction, often inherited, that can be exacerbated by trauma in childhood. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it over the years, in fact I’ve thought of little else, but I still don’t know why Hannah became the person that she did. Perhaps she did inherit her mother’s psychiatric issues, perhaps the discovery of where she came from that day, aged seven, detonated a bomb that been sitting idle, waiting for its touchpaper to be lit. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I try my hardest not to dwell on the reasons why any more. I last saw Hannah – I no longer refer to her as my daughter – over twenty years ago. I never want to see her face again.

After I overheard Hannah on the phone to Emily that day, pretending to be ‘Becky’, I was thrown into a panic. I didn’t know what to do for the best. I knew I should call Rose to warn her, but I felt paralysed. Should I talk to Hannah first, try to dissuade her from her plan, whatever that might be? I needed to find out what she was intending to do. When she ended the call to Emily, I waited in the kitchen for her to come down, my head in turmoil, until I heard her door open and, a few seconds later, her tread on the stairs.

She glanced at me as she entered the kitchen, but as usual said nothing, coldly ignoring me as she went to the cupboard and started rooting around for food. I can still see her now. She was wearing black leggings and a T-shirt that might once have been white, her face a mess of last night’s make-up that she hadn’t bothered to wipe off. Yet still her beauty made me catch my breath. I thought again of the strange, fake voice she’d used on the phone, how she’d called herself ‘Becky’, and I shuddered. At last I steeled myself and cleared my throat. ‘Hannah?’