Then She Vanishes(100)

A police spokeswoman confirmed that a man has been arrested and released without charge.



I don’t hear from Margot until the next day.

I’m halfway home when she calls.

She’s crying and her voice is thick through her tears. My stomach tightens. ‘Margot? Are you okay? Is it Flora?’

She’s died. That’s what I’m expecting. But instead Margot says, ‘Flora’s had a stroke.’

I stop in my tracks, gazing out across the river, even though it’s dark and I can’t see much, except the occasional light in a window at the apartments. The river looks black in this light, undulating, stagnant.

A stroke? ‘But isn’t she too young for a stroke?’ It’s a silly thing to say, I know that. But all the people I’ve ever known to have a stroke have been old, like my granddad and Rory’s great-uncle Cian.

‘It’s a result of the many years of drug abuse.’ Margot’s voice sounds so sad that my eyes fill with tears. ‘It’s severe, I’m afraid. She may never recover, fully.’

‘Oh, Margot …’ The unfairness strikes me. This cruel, shit world, I think, and I kick the wooden bench that overlooks the river hard, hurting my foot. Then I slump onto the bench, no longer afraid that I’m being watched. That particular fear is over now that I know it was Finn who’d been following me.

‘Before the stroke, she admitted it all,’ continues Margot, in that same resigned voice. ‘She hadn’t meant to shoot Heather. Heather had been trying to stop her. Clive and Deirdre had kept her prisoner for years, a prisoner to heroin, and she was pushed to the edge.’

‘Did Flora ever tell you what happened that day?’ I ask, as I light a cigarette.

I listen in silence, taking the occasional drag as Margot tells me the sequence of events of that fateful morning.

Heather had taken Flora back to Margot’s house at the caravan park with the idea that she would work on convincing her sister that they needed to go to the police. She left Flora sleeping in her room to make a cup of tea but when she returned Flora had gone. The drawer to the half-moon chest in the hallway was open and, straight away, Heather knew what her sister was about to do because it was where the key to the gun cabinet was kept. Heather raced into the barn just in time to see Flora taking the shotgun from the cabinet. ‘It’s the only way I can stop them doing this to someone else,’ Flora had said.

Heather tried to wrestle the gun from Flora’s grasp. But it went off and the bullet struck Heather in the chest. She stumbled and hit her head. Flora thought she had killed her. She was so devastated that she no longer cared what happened to her. She took Heather’s car (‘God knows how she drove it when she’s never had a lesson even if it is an automatic,’ said Margot) and headed for Deirdre’s house in Tilby. She knew the road name as she’d heard them talking about it. The West Ham sticker in the window made her sure she was entering the right house.

After she’d shot them she took a bus back to Bristol. She was too scared to hand herself in, instead managing to score heroin and sleeping rough. One day she saw me coming home from work and followed me, dossing down in the derelict building opposite. Apparently she was trying to reach out to me. She worked out which apartment was mine and then she managed to sneak into my building behind a neighbour and pushed the bus ticket through my letterbox in an attempt to tell me she was in Bristol. But I hadn’t made the connection because I’d thought Flora was dead.

‘She thought she’d killed Heather,’ Margot finishes. ‘And she was scared to come forward. She told the police everything before her stroke. Gary,’ she coughs, ‘um, DCI Ruthgow, has been amazing. Heather will face no charge. And poor Flora …’

‘What will happen to Flora now?’ Surely she won’t be prosecuted for murder, not after everything they did to her and what she’s been through.

Angela at the police press office told me earlier that this was just the tip of the iceberg. Clive had been prolific and Flora was getting too old for him. If Heather hadn’t found her when she had, I’ve no doubt Clive would have killed her. Maybe he would have given her just that little bit too much heroin and buried her in the basement too.

It was just by chance that Clive and Deirdre had bumped into Flora that August night. They’d been coming back from the fair where Clive and Norman had been doing some dodgy drugs deal. Apparently, according to Margot, Clive had recognized Flora from the fair and had taken the opportunity to lure her into the car, knowing she wouldn’t be afraid if his mother was there.

It’s Deirdre’s role in all this I can’t get over. How could she have helped her son to abduct these women, turned a blind eye as he drugged and raped them? I’ll never understand it.

‘Flora’s too ill to face charges,’ says Margot. ‘Temporary insanity would be her plea, though I’m sure if it ever … if it ever came to her being fit enough to stand trial, although that’s not likely …’

‘Oh, God, Margot. I’m so sorry.’

I close my eyes, tears seeping out from underneath my lashes as I think of Flora as I like to remember her: a sixteen-year-old girl in love, floating about her sunny bedroom in her long skirts and DM boots, singing along to ‘Martha’s Harbour’ and no doubt thinking of Dylan.

‘Despite the stroke, and how ill she is, at least she’s safe. She’s away from those monsters,’ says Margot.