The Bad Things (7 page)

His hands were busy with the controller. ‘Besides. Me and my mates think they should bring the death penalty back. For murderers of kids. They don’t deserve to live. Do they, Mum?’ Another zombie bit the dust.

What should she say? Teenagers saw things in black and white – there was no grey or in-between in their world. But then, how could she disagree with him when she didn’t? For most of her life she had been vehemently against the death penalty, arguing that it was plain murder by the state, and that the sign of a civilized society was the way it treated criminals. But that was then. Fifteen years ago she changed and believed nothing short of hanging would have been good enough for Martin Jessop and the same for Jackie Wood, even though she was only found guilty of being an accessory. But the pair of them made the family go through a long and tortuous court case, which completely destabilized Sasha. There had been no rest for any of them; every day they had to live with what had happened.

Now she hated her, Jackie Wood, more than him. That woman could have stopped Jessop. She could have not given him an alibi and saved them weeks of misery, of the police hunting for the bodies.

But although Jessop was dead, the guilt was still alive in her. Her house. Her garden. Her fault.

If Jackie Wood had any self-respect, any at all, she would reveal where Millie was buried.

‘Do you ever wonder what happened to Millie?’ Gus’s voice broke into her thoughts.

She took his hand and squeezed it. ‘All the time.’

‘Ask her, Mum, won’t you?’

She nodded, her throat all at once too full to speak.

8

The rain had eased off by the time Alex reached the caravan site at the harbour end, but still she pulled her scarf up around her face. The rain might have stopped, but the wind was still strong enough to make skin sore, especially when combined with the salt from sea spray. The sea looked rough and wild, too, and you couldn’t tell where the greyness of the sky bleached into the greyness of the sea. Plenty of white horses rolled into the shore, only broken up by the groynes that stretched out like witches’ fingers into the water. Seagulls swooped and screeched overhead, and in the distance the smooth, ping-pong dome of the nuclear power station rose like a modernist sculpture.

The caravan site, rather obviously called ‘Harbour’s End’ was, as it said on the tin, at the end of the harbour road and opposite the lifeboat station. At its entrance were the public toilets.

She looked at the piece of paper that had the directions to the caravan on it; the cold air making her shiver. Number forty-four. Down the main bit of road, turn second left, and it was at the end of the row.

The wind moaned in and around the lines of static caravans. She saw the odd person in the distance, tending to the outside of the vans, but generally it was very quiet. A ghost town.

Jackie Wood’s caravan, which was cream and green with a lick of decay, just like the other hundred or so, was opposite the river that ran into the sea, with a good view of the fishermen’s ramshackle huts and the row upon row of fishing boats, some from Lowestoft, some from Aldeburgh, most from Sole Bay. There were net curtains at the windows, and a couple of terracotta pots either side of the door, sporting fronds of grass and dead twigs. Alex stopped, realizing she was shivering not just from the cold, but also because she felt lost, a bit frightened even. What was she expecting Jackie Wood to say? Come on, she told herself, treat this like any other interview.

She thought back to the last time she’d seen Wood, before the court case. She was being interviewed on the News Channel –
News 24
as it was then – sitting in her flat, Martin Jessop by her side. Mr Jessop from upstairs. Nice flats they were too; a well done Georgian conversion in a decent part of town. Nobody wanted to rent them after Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop were arrested for murder. They were holiday lets now; completely repainted, redecorated, rehabilitated. There was a campaign to get the whole block demolished and a memorial garden planted. But the Sole Bay Society put their boots in and saved the Georgian building. It didn’t really matter to Alex – Georgian building or memorial garden – it was still where her nephew and niece had been murdered.

When they first went missing, there she was, Jackie Wood, sitting next to him – the murderer – and saying what a tragedy it was. How the community had to pull together, that they were pulling together, and were organizing searches of the town, the beaches, the dunes, the harbour. The local and national media were hungry for interviewees about ‘the situation’, and Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop fitted the willing bill. Wood, the local librarian; Jessop, a lecturer at the college in Ipswich. There was much speculation about their relationship. Again, something else the media wanted to romanticize; document every twist and turn.

If only they had known there was a much better story than that.

If she closed her eyes, Alex could still see her, head cocked slightly to one side, the furrowed forehead, the oh-so-sympathetic expression. He, meanwhile, just looked at his shoes. Then, suddenly, he gazed at the camera and shook his head.

‘They were lovely children,’ he said. ‘So polite. Full of life.’

Past tense.

And she remembered knowing then; knowing absolutely that they were the ones who had taken the twins.

When they were arrested, the feeding frenzy really started.

‘She is in,’ said a voice from behind her, interrupting her memories. ‘She’s always in.’

Alex looked over her shoulder. A woman of about thirty with a cigarette in one hand, mug in the other, was standing in the doorway of the caravan opposite. The dark roots were showing in her hair, and her face had lost the fresh-skin look of youth. Alex wondered what she was doing in a caravan on the Suffolk coast in the middle of winter.

‘I came this way looking for work.’ The woman had read her mind. ‘Thought it might be easier here than in the city.’

She wondered which city she meant. ‘And has it been easier?’ she asked.

The woman shrugged. ‘No, not really. But I have got a few shifts at the Tesco’s on the high street, so I reckon that’s better than nothing.’

Alex nodded. The idea of a new supermarket in the middle of the town had caused a lot of local consternation when planning permission was granted. There were petitions, and placards, and letters to the planning office and the local MP, and God knows who, but it had lumbered forward like a boulder rolling down a hill squashing everything in its path.

‘Anyway,’ the woman went on, ‘give her a knock.’

‘Thanks,’ Alex said.

‘Do you know her?’

‘Sort of.’ She managed to give a rictus smile.

‘She looks familiar.’

‘Really?’

The woman shrugged. ‘Tell her she can come over and have a coffee if she wants. Wouldn’t want her feeling lonely here.’

Alex nodded. ‘Okay.’

The woman shut her door.

Alex swallowed. Her mouth was dry and her heart was thudding. She pressed her fist against her breastbone. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered. The enormity of her actions had just dawned on her. She was about to come face-to-face with the woman who was – whatever some bloody judge said – complicit in the murder of Harry and Millie. And she was supposed to be carrying out an interview with Jackie Wood when all she wanted to do was to shake out the answer to the question that had haunted her family for more than a decade – where was Millie buried?

And why shouldn’t she? There was no need to talk to Jackie Wood for any length of time; she could even ditch the idea of an article. Nothing lost, except more of her dwindling savings. And she would have had the chance to ask her about Millie. On another level, Alex was curious about the woman; about what had made her tick then and what made her tick now. How she could sit and blatantly lie to everybody; the lies she was still continuing to tell now?

Let out on a technicality. That was not innocence.

Squaring her shoulders, she lifted her hand up to knock on the door.

It opened before her hand made contact.

‘I saw you standing outside. Alex.’ Jackie Wood’s voice was pitched a little too high and had the soft Suffolk burr that Alex remembered from the courtroom – both characteristics had been blurred by the television microphones. What was more startling was that the long black hair she had seen on the screen was now cut short and dyed blonde. Jackie Wood was dressed in an off-white fluffy fleece, faded, ill-fitting black jeans, and brown slippers with pom-poms on the toes. She was even more diminished than she had seemed on television and her skin had not yet regained a healthy colour. Alex guessed the woman opposite was telling the truth; Jackie Wood didn’t venture out much.

She was so very
ordinary
.

Then Alex noticed the scar down one side of her face, the skin puckered, as though it had been sewn up by a child.

Jackie Wood blinked at her. ‘Come in. I’ve been expecting you for ages. Let’s not talk on the doorstep.’ She opened the door a little wider while keeping herself inside the caravan.

For a moment, Alex was outside of her body. One part of her looking at what she was doing and wondering how the hell she could do it, the other part of her relishing the idea of talking to the woman. She wanted to sniff the air, see if she could smell evil.

Not evil, but fustiness. The smell of a tin box that rarely had its windows or doors opened. Stale cigarette smoke, too. Grease, fat; the lingering smell of fast food. The lightness in her head dissolved.

‘Take a seat.’ Jackie Wood waved to a cloth-covered bench to one side of the caravan. The table in front of it was crowded with papers, a plate with a piece of half-chewed toast on it, and an overflowing ashtray. Some sort of convector heater was pumping out warm air. She sat on the bench, sliding round behind the table.

‘Sorry about the mess,’ said Jackie Wood, whipping away the plate and putting it into the tiny sink. ‘I should have cleared up before you came.’

‘It’s okay,’ said Alex, noticing that she had quite an array of daily newspapers, from
The Times
to the
Daily Star
. Again, Jackie Wood saw her looking and began gathering them up into a pile.

‘Something to do, isn’t it?’ she said, nodding towards the papers. ‘I like to see whether there are any stories in them about me. Since I came out. Sometimes, you know, they get the facts about me wrong. One of the papers kept saying I was forty-four years old. I’m not. I’m forty-three. It’s horrible reading really personal things about yourself in newspapers. And it’s even worse when they’re lies. Do you think I should write to the editor?’ She stood still, looking at Alex, blinking slowly. Then she turned away and dumped the papers onto the floor with a thump. ‘Are you warm enough? I’ve taken to wearing these thick fleece things, keeps the wind out.’ She plucked at the material. ‘It’s so bloody cold in this part of the world.’

‘Wind off the Urals,’ Alex said, for the sake of saying something after the sudden change of subject.

‘That’s what they say.’ Jackie Wood was nervous. Probably as nervous as she was, Alex realized. ‘I’ll make the coffee.’ Pom-poms flapping, she made the short journey over to the sink, filled the kettle and set it on the top of the cooker.

Alex shrugged off her coat and put it down beside her, looking around the caravan. Not much to see, really. A small kitchenette, cupboards above the sink and cooker; a corridor that she guessed led to the bedrooms – two?– , and bathroom. A couple of paintings on the walls. One was a view of beach huts. The other of a few lonely sheep in the middle of a snowy field. Both had the corpses of insects preserved behind the glass.

There was silence while they both waited for the kettle to boil.

‘Here we are.’

Jackie Wood set a tray down on the table. On the tray was a cafetière of coffee and two plain, white mugs. There was a plate with chocolate digestives. A jug of milk. A bowl of sugar. She hovered.

‘Shall I pour?’ Alex asked.

Jackie Wood nodded. ‘Please.’

She pressed the plunger of the cafetière, hearing that pleasing sucking sound, then poured out two mugs of coffee. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

Jackie Wood nodded again. ‘Lots of milk. Three sugars. Please.’

Alex did the honours, wondering when the Mad Hatter was going to turn up. ‘Here you go.’

‘Thanks.’ Jackie Wood lowered herself onto a plastic chair.

Alex took a sip of coffee and then reached into her bag, taking out her digital recorder. ‘I hope it’s okay to record our interview, Jackie.’ She tried not to stumble over her name. She had never thought of her as ‘Jackie’, only ‘that woman’ or ‘the murderer’s accomplice’, or ‘Jackie Wood’, both names together. To call her Jackie was implying an intimacy that she didn’t feel. But then that’s what she did all the time; that was her job. She had to think of this as another job. Money. Cash. Gus’s skiing trip. Millie’s grave. No, not that, not yet.

‘I know who you are, you know.’ The words were spoken quietly.

Alex switched on the recorder then looked up at her. ‘Really?’

‘I’ve known ever since Jonny Danby told me you were coming.’ She smiled. ‘You think I’d forget you? Sasha’s sister?’

Alex held up her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she said.

‘Don’t what?’

‘Just…don’t. Her name.’

‘What? Sasha? What should I call her?’

‘Not her name. After what you and Jessop did. It does not give you the right to call her by her first name.’

She looked startled. ‘What Martin did. Not me. Not me. Anyway, I looked you up. Googled you. Found out about your work. I’d never read any.’

It didn’t surprise Alex that Danby had lied. ‘
She likes your work.
’ Please.

Jackie Wood smiled. ‘We didn’t get too many upmarket newspapers in High Top. And when we did, someone had always nicked the supplements.’ She shifted herself and reached into the back pocket of her jeans, pulling out a squashed packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, pulling one out and putting it between her cracked lips. ‘Only it’s a hard habit to break. Something to do when you’re banged up.’