Afraid (37 page)

‘Why don’t you go and see if Andrea’s finished speaking with the doctor while we explain things to Skye?’ Val suggested.

Jeff was reluctant to let this woman talk to Skye when he still blamed her for Skye having gone missing in the first place, but he had to admit that he wasn’t doing too good a job of it himself so far. So, conceding defeat, he stood up and backed towards the door, telling Skye, ‘I’ll be right outside if you need me.’

Val sat down when he’d left the room, and shuffled the chair a little closer to the bed as Jones took a seat on the other side.

‘We know you don’t want to hear this,’ she started gently, ‘but the man you knew as Tom was not a good man, and whatever he told you about your parents was a lie. He just wanted to make you think that he was the only one you could trust so he could control you. It’s called grooming.’

‘No.’ Skye shook her head. ‘He loves me. We’re going to get married. Look.’ She held up her hand, and frowned when she saw that her finger was bare. ‘Where’s my ring?’

‘It’s been taken for evidence,’ Jones told her.

‘But it’s mine,’ Skye protested. ‘Tom bought it for me.’

‘No, my love, he didn’t,’ Val informed her. ‘It belonged to the lady who owned the house, and he stole it from her after he murdered her. And then he moved into her house so that he could lure young girls like yourself there.’

‘You don’t even know him,’ Skye muttered defensively. ‘He’s not like that – he wouldn’t hurt anyone.’

‘The old lady’s body was found in a freezer in the shed,’ Jones told her. ‘And he’s already confessed to killing her,’ he added, trying to conceal his disgust at the memory of the almost gloating way in which Jamie Thornton had spoken about his crimes when they had collared him after removing Skye from the house. It seemed as if he had decided that, if he was going down for a long one, he might as well do it in a blaze of notoriety and admit to being a serial killer. Yet, strangely, despite having admitted to killing three people, Thornton had adamantly refused to accept that there had been anything inappropriate about his relationships with the girls – despite his first victim having been just thirteen years old, and the fact that he had drugged them all in order to render them helpless as he videoed himself abusing them. In his mind, they had all wanted it as much as he had.

A shadowy memory of Bernie trying desperately to get into the shed the first time she let him out had just flitted through Skye’s mind. But she quickly shook it away, convinced that they were making it all up.

‘He also murdered two young girls,’ Jones went on. ‘Their names were Sarah and Chloe, and they were both a little younger than you.’

‘Chloe?’ Skye repeated numbly.

‘Did you know her?’ Val asked, guessing from her reaction that she had.

Skye nodded, and croaked, ‘She stayed with us for a few weeks, but then Tom took her home.’

‘He didn’t,’ said Jones. ‘He murdered her and dumped her body by the canal. She was wearing a necklace when she was found,’ he went on gently. ‘And it has since been identified as a necklace that was given to you.’

‘My angel?’ Skye peered up at him with agony in her eyes. ‘Hayley gave it to me for my birthday.’

Conscious of their decision to avoid the subject of Hayley, Jones said, ‘You look tired, so I think we’ll leave it at that for today. We’ll talk to you again when you’re feeling a little stronger.’

‘Are you going to send me to prison?’ Skye asked.

‘Of course not,’ Val assured her. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong, and you are
not
in trouble. The police just need to know what happened while you were staying at that house, so they can put their case together properly.’

‘Are you going to take me away again?’

Val saw the dread in Skye’s eyes and shook her head. ‘No, you’ll be allowed to go home when you leave here,’ she promised. ‘But I’ll still be involved, because you’ve been through a traumatic experience and I’ll need to monitor your progress and make sure you’re settling back into normal life.’

Skye stared at her after she said this, and chewed on her lip. Then, her voice tiny, she asked, ‘Did I really lose the baby, or have you given it to someone who can look after it better than me?’

‘I’m really sorry, but you
did
lose it,’ Val told her gently, omitting to add what all the adults who were involved in this case were thinking: that it was a blessing the baby hadn’t survived. Skye might believe that she would have wanted it now, but her feelings would undoubtedly have changed once she’d faced up to the reality of the situation, and she might well have subconsciously transferred the blame for its father’s actions onto its head at some point – which would have been terrible both for her
and
the baby.

Skye’s face crumpled as the realisation that she hadn’t just lost her baby but had actually
killed
it settled over her. Her dad had said that it was already dead when it was born, and that must have been because she’d been punching it. And it didn’t matter that she hadn’t known it was in there, or that she’d had no control over her actions. She had killed her baby, and she would never forgive herself for that.

‘I want Tom,’ she sobbed as fresh tears began to cascade down her cheeks.

Val asked Jones to go and fetch Skye’s parents. Then, gazing down at Skye when he’d gone, she said, ‘I know this is hard for you to understand right now, my love, but you have got to try and forget about Tom. We’ll all do our very best to help you to get through this, so you never need to feel as though you’re on your own. And if there’s ever anything you feel uncomfortable discussing with your parents, I hope you know that you can always talk to me.’

Skye rolled onto her side without answering and sobbed into her pillow. She was the guilty one, not Tom, and she wished they would stop saying terrible things about him, because they didn’t know him like she did. He was the only one who had ever really loved her, and she didn’t believe that he had hurt those people. They were just trying to make her hate him so that she would have no one to protect her when they locked her up.

Jeff and Andrea had been sitting in silence in the corridor while Jones and the social worker spoke with Skye. They hadn’t talked much since hearing that Skye had been found, and had been taking it in turns to sit beside her bed over the last two days while they waited for her to come round. And, now that she was back with them, they were both deep in thought about the future.

After hearing about the horrors that her child had suffered at the hands of that depraved man, Andrea had realised that she had to stop thinking about herself and Jeff, and concentrate on Skye. In the weeks since they had buried that poor child who they had mistakenly thought was Skye, she had gone through agony: not only grieving for her daughter, but also for the loss of her marriage. She had been well for weeks, but had pretended not to be in order to keep Jeff from leaving. But it hadn’t worked, and he had been on the verge of walking out when the news had come that Skye had been found. He hadn’t left yet, but Andrea had realised that there was no point hanging onto him if his heart was no longer in it. It wouldn’t be easy, because he was the only man she had ever truly loved – and she still did. But he was a good man and he deserved to be happy and, if that meant being away from her, then she was ready to let him go.

Determined that Skye should stay with her, she had already spoken to the housing officer about the urgency of them finding her somewhere to live; and she’d also spoken to her case worker about getting help to buy beds and furniture. Jeff would probably say that she wasn’t ready to look after Skye on her own just yet, but she would do everything in her power to prove that she was.

Beside her, Jeff was also thinking about Skye. He hadn’t really understood what Jones and Dean had meant when they had tried to warn him that Skye might be in denial about the man who had effectively abducted her, but he totally got it now. The evil bastard had fed her a pack of lies, and it broke Jeff’s heart to think that Skye believed that he and Andrea hated her so much that they would try to pin the stabbing on her. But what really killed him was the thought of the physical abuse that his innocent child had endured at the hands of that beast, and the guilt that he hadn’t been able to save her was already eating away at him. And, worse, it appeared that the grooming had started way before the stabbing, when, hidden behind the innocuous screen-name QTPye, this monster had gained his daughter’s trust and got her to confide her inner thoughts by posing as a girl of the same age who understood how she felt.

This had all come to light after the police’s IT experts had hacked into Skye’s chat-room account and read the intimate conversations that she’d unwittingly had with the man. Jeff was ashamed to think that it had been going on right under his nose, and that he had never once realised how unhappy Skye was. More than that, he was ashamed to have been the cause of that misery. He’d thought she was unaffected by his and Andrea’s fighting, but he couldn’t have been more wrong. Skye had obviously been deeply hurt by the rift in her family, but with her parents too preoccupied with each other to notice her, and her only real-life friend often too ill to talk to, what choice had she had but to turn to a stranger for comfort?

‘Jeff, Andrea … you can go in now.’

Jeff pushed his guilty thoughts to the back of his mind at the sound of Jones’s voice. He stood up and thanked the man, and then turned to Andrea. She hadn’t moved and, when he saw the fear in her eyes, he guessed that she was scared to face Skye because she felt every bit as guilty as he did.

‘Come on, love,’ he said softly, holding out his hand. ‘I know it’s hard, but she needs us.’

EPILOGUE

Shirley slowed the car down, and then came to a stop when she spotted the number of the aisle they were looking for.

‘Is that Skye?’ she asked when she gazed out through the window and saw a young girl kneeling beside a grave halfway along the row.

Jeff glanced out and said, ‘Yeah, I think so,’ as he reached over to the back seat for the flowers they had bought. ‘Are you ready?’ he asked then, unbuckling his seat belt.

‘I think I’d better stay in the car,’ Shirley said. ‘There’s a time and a place, and this isn’t it,’ she added, smiling to let him know that it was okay for him to go without her. ‘I’ll find the car park and wait for you there.’

Jeff nodded, and leaned over to kiss her. ‘Won’t be long.’

‘Take as long as you need,’ Shirley urged, stroking her swollen stomach. ‘This little one will keep me occupied. I swear he must have smuggled a football in there while I wasn’t looking.’

Jeff winked at her, and then climbed out of the car. The baby hadn’t been planned, but he couldn’t have been more delighted when Shirley had told him that she was pregnant. He’d told Skye and Andrea about it straight away, in order to save them from having to hear it from someone else. But he hadn’t mentioned it since, because he hadn’t wanted them to think he was rubbing their noses in his new-found happiness.

He and Andrea had been civil to each other since their split, but he knew it hadn’t been easy for her and it was out of respect for her that he hadn’t yet introduced Skye to Shirley. It would have to happen eventually, because she would soon have a little brother or sister. But Shirley was right: this was neither the time nor the place.

Skye hadn’t heard the car, but she did hear the footsteps. A look of surprise came over her face when she glanced up and saw her dad walking towards her.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, wiping her hands on her jeans as she stood up to greet him.

‘It’s her anniversary,’ said Jeff, nodding towards the other grave a little further down, in which he and Andrea had thought they’d been burying Skye at this time last year. ‘I brought flowers.’ He held up the bunches he was carrying. ‘One for Chloe, and one for Hayley. Although I’m not sure she needs them,’ he said, smiling as he gazed at the flowers already festooning Hayley’s grave.

‘She’d be touched that you bothered,’ Skye told him, taking one of the bunches from his hand and squatting down to place them alongside the ones that she herself had brought. ‘Where’s Shirley?’ she asked then, glancing round when she had straightened up.

‘She’s waiting in the car,’ Jeff told her. ‘She saw you down here, and didn’t want you to think she was intruding.’

Skye sighed and gave him a mock-stern look. ‘Dad, this is daft. I wish you’d all stop walking on eggshells around me.’

‘It’s not just you I’m thinking about – it’s your mum as well,’ Jeff reminded her.

‘You’ve been separated for ages, and she’s fine about it,’ Skye assured him. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, a sly little smile coming onto her lips, ‘she’s got her eye on someone else, so she’s not that bothered about you any more.’

‘Really?’ Jeff raised an eyebrow. ‘Who’s the lucky man?’

‘That copper mate of yours,’ Skye told him. ‘Although I don’t think he’s realised yet.’

‘Who, Jones?’

‘Which one’s he? The tall blond one, or the nice-looking dark-haired one.’

‘The second.’

‘Him, then.’

‘Dean?’ Jeff’s eyebrow crept up a bit more. ‘Wow. I’m surprised.’

‘I don’t see why.’ Skye laughed. ‘He’s nice, and he looks a bit like you. I think he kind of likes her, as well,’ she said then. ‘’Cos he’s always calling round to see if we’re okay. He makes out like it’s just ’cos of what happened, but I can tell it’s really her he’s come to see. Doubt he’ll ever say anything to her, though, ’cos he probably thinks he’ll be treading on your toes.’

Jeff gazed at his daughter in wonderment. It had taken months for her to come to terms with her ordeal, and there had been times when he had thought that she would be scarred for ever. But with her mum’s help, and the support of the police and Social Services, she had gradually accepted the truth of the situation and had been going from strength to strength ever since.

The final piece of the puzzle had fallen into place for her at Jamie Thornton’s trial four months ago. It had dragged on for a couple of weeks, and Skye had bravely insisted on facing her abuser in court rather than give her evidence via a video link. She already knew by then that everything he had told her was a lie, but Jeff knew it had shocked her to learn that the man she had considered her saviour had been contemplating cutting his losses and disposing of her when she became pregnant, and only hadn’t gone through with it because he hadn’t been able to find a suitable replacement. It had also hurt her deeply to learn that
he
was the one who had been beating her stomach as she slept, in an effort to make her miscarry when the various medicines he’d been forcing her to take for her sickness had failed to do it.