The Girls (30 page)

‘Tyler, you
are
part of our family. You’ve always been part of our family.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘no I haven’t. Not properly. I thought I was. I really believed it. But then …’ She stabbed the skin of her potato with the tines of her fork. ‘Mum told me. Last week. She told me who my dad really is. I met him.’ She looked up at Adele with horror. ‘I met him last week. And he’s a … literally a nobody. He’s a loser. I mean, do you know where he’s been all my life? All the thirteen years that I’ve been alive?’

Adele shook her head.

‘In prison. My real dad. In prison. For beating up his girlfriend. Beating her up so badly that she’s blind in one eye.’

Adele clasped her throat.

‘Yeah. Exactly. So. Imagine that. All these years thinking that Leo was my dad. Thinking I had his blood in my blood. Thinking that your children were my sisters. And it turns out that I’ve got nothing to do with you. And that this ugly little rat of a man with tattoos on his hands and dirt under his nails, this little man who hasn’t even got a proper home, this man who hurts women –
he’s
the man who made me.’

‘Oh, Tyler …’

‘His name is Wayne. Imagine that. My dad is called Wayne. Wayne the Wife-beater.
God.
’

Adele couldn’t speak. She stared at the little scratches up and down Tyler’s scrawny arms. The scratches she said she’d got retrieving a football from a blackberry bush. She looked at the dull, greasy roots of her hair. She thought of the heaviness of the atmosphere between all the children these last couple of weeks.

‘It’s not …’ she began. ‘The man your mum’s dating – it’s not him, is it? It’s not your father?’

‘No!’ She looked appalled. ‘God. No! Mum thinks he’s disgusting too. Mum hates him. And you know, all those years that she let me think Leo was my dad, even though she knew he wasn’t, I think I get it. I think I do. Because she was in love with Leo. All along. Just like me. We were both in love with Leo. Both of us. We both wished he was my dad. And he’s not. He never was. And now he’s … All of you have … It’s all …’ She was crying properly, tears pouring down her cheeks.

‘Tyler …’ Adele put her hands out to Tyler’s, but Tyler snatched them back. She pushed back her chair and she collected her schoolbags. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Thank you for my tea.’

And she half ran from the café, away from Adele, knocking into people as she went.

Grace’s room was washed in golden light. The four of them sat around her bed watching the sun’s rays, filtered through the branches of a tree outside, flickering over her face. Pip wondered if she could feel it. Wondered if she could see the strobes through her closed eyelids. She wanted her to wake up, right now, like a princess from a fairy-tale slumber and then she wanted to say to her:
Tell me tell me tell me
.
What happened in the Rose Garden
? Because there was a question nagging at her in the darkest corners of her mind. A question she hadn’t asked Max earlier on. A question that hadn’t even occurred to her at the time. Something so obvious and so awful that maybe she hadn’t allowed herself to think it.

She looked at her beautiful sister, so still, so separate. Grace had been a baby when Pip came along. She’d never known a world without Pip in it and Pip had never known a world without Grace in it. They were as intrinsic to each other’s beings as their own shadows. And yet, in the black hole left behind after their father burned down their house, Grace had found a way to fill the void that didn’t include her. Another family. Another father. Another soul-mate. She hadn’t needed Pip at all. But now there was something Pip could do for her that nobody else could do. She could ask Max the question. The question that might provide the answer to who’d done this to her sister. And why.

She touched the sleeve of her father’s soft pink shirt and said, ‘Daddy. I need to do something. Will you come with me?’

She saw him immediately. He was still in his school uniform: grubby white polo shirt, navy trousers, scuffed, end-of-term leather shoes. He was playing football with his dad. He looked so happy, the very particular happy of a boy whose dad had come home from work early and said yes when asked if he’d come out and play football. It was the happiest she’d ever seen Max.

She felt guilty for a moment, to be interrupting Max’s special time with his dad, but there was no other option. She didn’t want to leave Grace at the hospital for any longer than necessary. She couldn’t bear not to be there when she opened her eyes. She wanted to be the first person Grace saw. She wanted to start everything all over again with Grace, to be once more her beginning and her end.

‘Max,’ she called out. She saw the look of joy fall immediately from his face. ‘Can I ask you something?’

Max looked curiously behind her at her father. She hoped he’d know without thinking too hard who he was. She hoped that the physical similarity was striking enough.

‘You know, on Saturday? You know when you were playing football? When you went up the hill to get your ball? And you saw Grace on the grass?’

He nodded, staring at his shoes. ‘Yeah.’

‘You know, before you came up? Can you remember who was in the playground?’

He looked at her strangely, as though the question didn’t compute. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, that night, when you were playing football. Who was in the playground?’

‘There was no one,’ he said, flatly, as though it was so obvious it didn’t need to be said. ‘There was no one in the playground.’

‘No one?’

‘No one. It was empty.’ He shrugged, apologetically.

Pip nodded, her head spinning with a sudden, awful rush of knowledge and understanding.

‘Thanks, Max. See you later.’

‘Yeah. See you later.’

She turned to her father, her face set hard. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘We can go back now.’

‘You got what you wanted?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I got what I wanted.’

Thirty

The atmosphere in the Howeses’ flat by the time the two PCs returned at six o’clock that evening was charged with so many different kinds of energy it was virtually electric. Adele had had to give Willow a dose of Tarentula hispanica, a homeopathic aid with indications towards calming hyperactivity in children. So far it didn’t seem to be working.

She offered them home-made hummus and breadsticks. Then she felt worried that the Greek PC would think she was patronising him, so she offered them, rather randomly, some pasta salad.

‘So,’ began PC Michaelides, ‘we’ve spent the day talking to various people, as you know, although we still haven’t managed to get hold of …’ He consulted his notes. ‘Cecelia Rednough.’

‘No,’ said Adele, wishing that Willow would stop bouncing up and down on the footstool. ‘She doesn’t tend to get home from work until quite late.’

‘Maybe we’ll give her another try after we’ve finished here then.’ He smiled, and then turned to Leo. ‘So, Mr Howes?’

‘Leo’s fine.’

‘Leo. Thank you. I wonder if we might be able to talk to you first? Possibly without the children?’ Adele looked up sharply, glancing from the PC to the WPC and then at her girls.

The WPC smiled reassuringly. ‘Just a couple of little things,’ she said. ‘Won’t take a minute.’

Adele gestured at the three girls to leave the room, which they did with varying degrees of grace.

After they’d gone all four turned and smiled at each other, nervously.

‘We were wondering’, said the PC, ‘if you could tell us a bit about your impressions of Grace Wild?’

‘My
impressions
? Gosh, well …’ He stroked his chin, making himself, in Adele’s opinion, look thoroughly dodgy. ‘She’s only been living on the garden for a few months, so I haven’t really had a chance to—’

‘I suppose’, the WPC cut in, ‘what we mean is: what was your relationship with her? Are you close?’

‘No,’ Leo replied, too fast, too firm. ‘Not at all. I mean, there are children on the garden who I’ve known since they were babies and I’d say I was close to them. But not Grace. She is just a friend of my daughters.’

‘The reason we’re asking, Leo, is that we’ve had our analysts going through the CCTV footage from Saturday night, from the cameras situated above the communal gates? And there is clear footage of you, at approximately nine twenty-five, approaching Grace Wild by the gate, engaging her for a while in conversation and then …’ He pulled a print from a folder on the sofa next to him and passed it to Leo. ‘… embracing her.’

Adele flicked her gaze to her husband, reptile fast. Then she looked down at the photo in her husband’s hand. It was almost a bird’s-eye view. There was Grace, her bare arms wrapped around the waist of a dark-haired man. A dark-haired man attached to a medium-sized golden dog.

‘Ah,’ said Leo, not making eye contact with Adele. ‘That. Oh. God. I mean, that was … She was standing there. Waiting for her boyfriend to come back. You know, I must be honest right now and say I wasn’t sober. You know, a big family day. Drinking since two p.m. So I don’t entirely remember what happened here. But I do remember seeing her standing there and me saying she should probably go home, because her mum wasn’t well and her sister was there on her own. And then, I honestly don’t know why, but she launched herself at me. I mean, if you watch the footage you’ll see it. You’ll see what happened. Look here, at my arm.’ He pointed at the photo. ‘It’s kind of hanging loose, see.’

‘Mr Howes – sorry, Leo. No one is accusing you of anything here. We’re merely trying to ascertain the nature of your relationship with Grace so that we can put all the jigsaw pieces together. And from this footage it struck us that maybe you and she were close. Maybe you had an insight?’

‘You know,’ he said, his eyes too bright, his body language all wrong, ‘it strikes me now, now that I think about it, that maybe she was missing her dad. It was her thirteenth birthday; she hasn’t seen him for such a long time. It’s possible she saw me for that brief moment as a father figure? Or that I reminded her in some way of her father? I mean …’ He shrugged and rubbed his chin again.

Stop talking!
Adele wanted to scream.
Please stop talking!

Who was this man? This man who kissed thirteen-year-old girls? Whose own father believed he’d been involved in the death of a teenager? Who may or may not have kissed their neighbour in the Rose Garden nine years ago? Who fuelled other people’s daughters’ fantasies about him being their Real Father? And who hugged other people’s daughters in dusky alleyways? Why hadn’t he told her about the interlude? Moments after this had happened, he’d been back at their flat, saying goodbye to Zoe and her family. Why hadn’t he said:
God, you won’t believe what just happened. Grace Wild just hugged me for no good reason!

The PCs stayed for an hour in the end. They talked to the girls, their questions yielding no more information than Adele had already extracted from them during the course of the day. They sat with Gordon for a while. Adele tried to hear what was being said but could catch very little. They’d briefed him very carefully beforehand to say nothing just yet about the missing sleeping pills. He’d said he’d be economical with the truth but that he wasn’t prepared to out-andout lie.

When they’d finished interviewing Gordon, the PCs appeared in the kitchen doorway with their empty water glasses and the half-finished hummus.

‘Well,’ said PC Michaelides, ‘I think we’ve got as much as we need for now. Thank you so much for your valuable time. We’ll let you get back to your lives now. And if we need to ask any more questions, would anyone be around tomorrow at all?’

Adele nodded, putting the hummus dish in the sink. ‘We’ll be here. All day. Every day. Just knock.’ She was trilling. She knew she was.

After they left the atmosphere flattened out immediately.

‘Well,’ said Gordon, ‘that wasn’t too bad. No mention of the sleeping pills. Think I might have a quick lie-down before supper. Assuming there is any supper? Mrs H.?’

She looked around her at the kitchen, at the fridge full of things to be cooked, at the pantry full of other things to be cooked. She looked at her daughters, at scruffy dreadlocked Catkin, dark-eyed, shavenheaded Fern, at Willow, with her wild eyes and misplaced energy. She looked at Gordon, the former scourge of the gardens, staring at her with hungry feed-me eyes and then at her husband, the teen-bothering, fantasy-dad murder suspect, and she suddenly thought,
I do not know any of you
.

‘I’m not sure about supper, Gordon,’ she said, her voice even and slow. ‘I think maybe Leo could order us some pizzas. Leo?’

Leo looked at her in surprise. Pizzas were usually only allowed in emergencies, when the train was late and you got home too late to cook. They were a special treat for the tail end of days gone wrong and plans gone awry. The girls cheered, oblivious to her disturbed state of mind. Leo pulled out the menu from the drawer where menus were kept. Everyone shouted out their preferences.

‘Del?’ Leo called over to her. ‘What do you want? Fiorentina?’

She nodded distractedly and left the room.

It was finally growing dark beyond the walls of the Royal Free. It had been light for so long and she’d been awake for so many hours that Pip felt almost as though she might have skipped a night. But now the lights on the ward were going on and at last this day was coming to an end. And then, just now, a second ago, there’d been a flicker across Grace’s left eye. And then another. And then another.

All four of them now stood over Grace’s bed, staring intently at her face. Her eyelids had been flickering for about a minute. The next flicker was accompanied by a full body twitch. Then a small groan. With each sign of life, they moved closer and closer until Pip was almost compelled to say:
Move back. You’re going to frighten her.
Pip held her hand against Grace’s cheek. Clare held her hand.

‘Do you think she’s waking up?’ Clare asked.

Pip’s dad nodded. ‘Should I get a nurse?’ he asked.

‘Not yet,’ said Clare, her eyes never leaving Grace’s face. ‘Not just yet.’

Grace groaned again. Then suddenly her eyes were opening, the bright hazel half-moons of her irises miraculously visible.