The Last Thing She Told Me Page 7

  ‘I don’t know any more than you,’ Mum said. ‘But I’ll never forgive you for opening this up. Whatever happens, whatever they find, just you remember that you’re responsible for all of this, and you’re the one who’s going to deal with it.’ She jabbed her finger at me, as if I was an evil daughter who had deliberately brought shame on the family.

  ‘Great, thanks. And I hope you remember everything I did for Grandma, all the times I dropped by to see her, did jobs around the house, got her shopping in, kept her company when you didn’t even bother to go and visit.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ shouted Mum.

  ‘Then make me understand. Tell me something I don’t know. Because, right now, none of this makes sense, least of all your reaction.’ I braced myself for the lecture about how I’d always been headstrong, always thought I’d known best yet had still been stupid enough to get myself knocked up at university.

  It didn’t come, though. She simply stared at me and spoke quietly but firmly: ‘You’d better go now.’

  ‘Fine. I came here to tell you that the police have put up a tent in the garden and started digging, and to warn you they might get in contact with you at some point, but if you don’t want to know anything more about it, that’s fine.’

  Mum’s face crumpled. ‘I want nothing more to do with this, or with you, do you understand?’

  ‘You’re not serious?’

  ‘I am. I told you not to meddle and you went ahead anyway. You’re on your own now.’

  I stared at her, unable to believe what I was hearing. ‘What about the girls?’ I asked.

  ‘You should have thought about them before you told the police, shouldn’t you?’

  Her words stabbed me in the stomach. I struggled to breathe because of the pain. ‘You can’t do this. You can’t cut them off to punish me for something Grandma did.’

  She looked at me, and I thought for a second she was going to say something. Change her mind. Break down in tears. She didn’t. She stood silently. The pain was etched into her face but she’d meant it. Meant every word. ‘Go,’ she shouted.

  I turned and left the house.

  *

  My phone rang as I was pulling up outside Grandma’s. The caller introduced himself as DI Freeman from CID.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’ve just arrived outside, actually.’

  ‘Great,’ he replied. ‘I’ll come out and speak to you in person.’

  It was only as I got out of the car that I noticed PC Cole standing outside the side entrance. There was police tape across it. In the background I could see several officers in white overalls in the garden. This wouldn’t go away, that much was clear.

  A middle-aged man with windswept sandy hair came out of the side entrance. We shook hands. The first spots of the promised rain started to fall.

  ‘Do you want to come inside a minute?’ I asked, gesturing towards Grandma’s kitchen.

  ‘Yeah, thanks,’ he replied.

  I got out my key and opened the back door. The kitchen still smelt of Grandma. I saw him take a look around. ‘She was a bit of a hoarder,’ I said. ‘It’s like something out of another era.’

  ‘My nan was the same,’ he said. ‘People didn’t used to move around in those days. Maybe that’s why they kept hold of so much stuff.’ He looked at me and came straight out with it. ‘We’ve found a second set of bones under the other statue.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, as if it was a perfectly normal thing to be told.

  ‘They’re very similar in size to the first set. We’ve sent them both off for analysis now. We’ll be able to tell you more when we’ve got the results back. In the meantime, we need to do a search of the house. It’s not that we’re expecting to find anything in here, but we need to rule it out as part of our procedures.’

  The thought of them taking the house apart, as if Grandma had been a mass-murderer with bodies lined up under the floorboards, jarred with me. ‘I know you’ve got to do your job, but I really don’t think you’ll find anything in here. As I said when I made my statement, Grandma was very specific about where the babies were.’

  ‘I understand that. Hopefully that will prove to be the case and we’ll be out of there as soon as we can be.’

  He wasn’t going to be budged on the issue, but I still felt uneasy about letting them do it. ‘You won’t, you know, tear anything up or knock anything down inside, will you? Only my grandma wouldn’t have liked that.’

  He gave me what I imagined was supposed to be a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll be as careful as we can. You can rest assured that everything will be put back as it was when we’ve finished, and any damage caused will be put right.’

  ‘Any idea how long it will take? Only I’ve got lots of my grandma’s belongings to sort through and I need to get started on some of the paperwork to do with the will.’

  ‘I’m hoping we’ll have it all done within a couple of days. That’s assuming we don’t find anything that warrants further investigation, of course.’

  ‘You won’t,’ I replied.

  ‘The other thing,’ he said, ‘was that you mentioned in your statement your daughter found a bit of bone. We’ll need that too.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, picturing Maisie’s face when I told her. ‘It was only a tiny thing.’

  ‘I appreciate that, but in order for our forensics team to be able to piece everything together, we’ll need it as soon as possible.’

  ‘Right. Can I go home and tell my daughter first? Only she doesn’t know about any of this yet. She thinks it’s a fairy bone.’ I wondered for a moment if he was starting to think I’d lost the plot.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t really do this but as it’s a Sunday – I’ve got a little girl myself so I know what it’s like – I’ll send someone round for it first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling as if he was on my side. ‘I really appreciate it.’ We stepped outside and I locked the back door. I was about to put the key back in my bag when I remembered. ‘You’d better have this,’ I said, handing it to him. ‘I’ve got a spare at home.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he replied. ‘The other thing you need to be aware of is that our media team took a call from Look North earlier. We’re expecting them to turn up at any time.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘Can’t help it, I’m afraid.’

  ‘They won’t name her, will they?’

  ‘Probably. She was on the electoral register, nothing to stop them, really.’

  ‘But what will they say?’

  ‘They’ll say what’s happened. That two sets of bones, believed to be human, have been found in the back garden. What people make of that is up to them.’

  He wasn’t on my side at all. He was being nice to me but he still probably thought Grandma was a murderer. I said goodbye and headed back to my car, not wanting to be there when the media turned up. Maybe Mum was right. Maybe I didn’t have a clue what I’d unleashed. And maybe I was going to regret it.

  It became a regular thing after that. I met him at the gate early every Tuesday morning and we’d walk up to the ridge together to watch the sunrise. It was our thing. I don’t know why. There was no one around to see us at that time. I guessed that was important to him although I didn’t really see why. We weren’t doing anything, just walking and talking. Some days he didn’t even talk much. He looked at me, though. He was always looking at me. It was like he was sizing me up, trying to work out if I’d grown since the previous week. It made me think of that thing in Hansel and Gretel where the witch keeps checking to see if Hansel is fat enough to eat.

  It was 21 June, the day he decided I was ready. The longest day of the year. He told me it was a special day as we walked up to the ridge. I thought he meant because of the summer solstice: it was the earliest I’d ever got up to see the sunrise. I didn’t think there was
another reason.

  The sky was clear, the ground under our feet firm after a rare dry spell. He sat down at the top of the ridge and patted the ground next to him. We never sat down, always stood, but I did what I was told. He put his arm around me, his hand resting on my shoulder. Like he was protecting me. Like it was all perfectly normal. That we did this stuff all the time. I kept staring straight ahead at the horizon, scared to look at him in case he asked me something and I said the wrong thing in reply. He waited until the second the sun popped up and then he turned and kissed me, properly, on the lips. He had his hand at the back of my head, so I couldn’t pull away. I don’t know if I would have done if I could. All I knew was that I couldn’t.

  His lips were warm and dry against mine. His moustache prickled my face. He smelt of men. Grown-up men. The sort I shouldn’t have been sitting on top of a ridge with at four thirty in the morning. Maybe that was why it didn’t feel romantic, just wrong. When at last he pulled away he had a smile on his lips. His eyes bored into me, watching me closely. Waiting to see what my reaction would be.

  Behind him the sky was ablaze with orange. All I could think of was to keep staring at the sunrise. Make it look as if this kind of thing happened to me every day. More than anything, I didn’t want him to know that I had never been kissed before. Not even by a boy, let alone a man. I wondered if he’d been able to tell that. If I’d done it all wrong. Maybe he was laughing at me inside. I said nothing. I got up and started walking back down the ridge. There was a moment when I didn’t think he was going to follow me. But a few seconds later I heard his footsteps behind mine.

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t go all coy on me now. You’ve been wanting this for a long time.’

  Had I? I wasn’t sure any more what I wanted. What I thought this whole thing was about. I said nothing and carried on walking, trying desperately to stop the tears that were gathering at the corners of my eyes. I should have felt happy. A man had kissed me. I should have felt grown-up. I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. Why I felt like that.

  When we got to the gate he let me go on ahead. He always did. I suppose it was so nobody saw us together, though I’d never actually asked. I usually said goodbye then, but I was scared of opening my mouth in case my voice came out all wrong.

  ‘I know you’re playing hard to get but you’ll be back for more,’ he called, from behind me.

  7

  I made sure the girls were busy upstairs before I turned on the local evening news. I’d been warned. I knew it was coming. And yet I still felt physically sick as I watched the footage of a reporter outside Grandma’s house come up on the screen, saw the shot zoom down the side entrance to the white tent in the garden. I heard the words the reporter said but they didn’t feel connected to me. She was talking about police digging in the back garden of a house in Pecket Well that had belonged to a recently deceased ninety-year-old lady, Betty Pilling. She was not talking about Grandma. And when she said the investigation had commenced after the discovery of what were believed to be human remains, she was not talking about the fairy bone Maisie had found. Or the tiny skull, the photo of which I still had on my phone. She was talking about something else entirely. Something unconnected with me.

  ‘Hey,’ said James, coming into the room and seeing the tears streaming down my face.

  ‘Look what I’ve done,’ I said, pointing at the screen. ‘I’ve fucked up big-time. Everyone’s going to be talking about it, asking questions. The girls are going to get all kinds of grief at school.’

  ‘Come on, we knew this could happen,’ said James.

  ‘Did we? I don’t think I did. I had this stupid idea that the police would come and say it was nothing to worry about, put them back in the ground and thank me for doing my public duty.’

  ‘You still did the right thing.’

  ‘I think I’ve been incredibly stupid. I may regret this for the rest of my life. We don’t know where it’s going to end, do we? What if they say she murdered them? We can’t prove them wrong.’

  James sighed and stroked my arm. ‘Nic, she’s dead. They can’t bring charges.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, though, does it? It’s her reputation, that’s what will be in tatters. Our whole family’s reputation. This is what Mum warned me would happen and she was probably right. And now she never wants to see me or the girls again and the whole thing’s a fucking mess.’

  James let me bury my head against his chest. I was a tangled mass of hair and tears and regret. Nothing had changed, really. Maybe nothing would ever change. I used to think that becoming a mother must somehow endow you with wisdom and common sense but clearly that was not the case. I was still as capable of screwing up now as I had been at nineteen.

  ‘Does she still want to see me, then?’ asked James.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your mum. You said she doesn’t want to see you or the girls again. Does that mean I still have to see her?’

  ‘Piss off,’ I said, digging him in the ribs.

  ‘At least it got a smile out of you.’

  ‘It’s still a complete mess, though,’ I said, wiping my eyes and pushing my hair back behind my ears. ‘I’m going to have to talk to the girls. I can’t have them going into school tomorrow not knowing what’s happening. I’ll be there to support Maisie but Ruby will be on her own.’

  ‘I’ll do it if you don’t feel up to it.’

  ‘No. I got us into this mess, I need to get us through it.’

  *

  I waited until just before bedtime. Sunday evenings at this time of year were usually cosy affairs, involving baths, onesies and catching up on crap TV. They were occasionally punctuated by a wail of ‘I can’t find my PE kit’ or ‘I’ve forgotten my homework’ and a resulting chaotic interlude but they usually ended with everyone in a suitably content Sunday stupor. Now I was about to throw a hand-grenade into that. Somehow I needed to find the strength to cope with the fallout.

  Ruby was already in bed, her head buried inside the latest Katherine Rundell. It was one of the things I missed, reading to her. It had disappeared when she started high school, along with handholding and calling me ‘Mummy’.

  Maisie would no doubt follow suit at some point, but for now I could still enjoy bedtime reading with her – even if she did interrupt at least three times a minute.

  I sat down on the end of Maisie’s bed. She was snuggled with her usual menagerie of soft toys. Her long, dark-brown hair was still damp at the ends but that was the least of my worries tonight.

  ‘I need to talk to you both about something,’ I said. Ruby immediately looked up from her book, her expression hovering between three and four on the worried scale.

  ‘Maisie, you know when you found that fairy bone in Great-grandma’s garden?’

  ‘This one?’ she asked, picking it up off her bedside table where it was displayed on a piece of pink tissue paper.

  I nodded. ‘Well, it made me wonder if there were any more bits of bone under there. So I did a bit of digging myself yesterday and I did find some more. The thing is, though, they’re not actually fairy bones.’

  ‘Are they a cat or dog’s bones?’ asked Maisie. ‘Daddy said Great-grandma might have buried a pet in her garden.’

  I could feel Ruby’s intense gaze on me. I had to be truthful, as difficult as it was going to be. ‘We don’t think they’re animal bones either. It looks like they could be little human bones from a very long time ago.’

  Maisie frowned at me, looked at the bone fragment in her hand and immediately put it down. ‘Like cavemen bones?’

  I was making a hash of this. Ruby’s gaze still hadn’t left me. She was now at six on the worried scale. ‘Not from that long ago, no. But from before Daddy or I were born.’

  ‘Why were they buried in Great-grandma’s garden?�
��

  ‘We don’t know,’ I said, glancing at Ruby. ‘That’s why we’ve asked the police to investigate.’

  ‘The police?’ said Ruby, dropping her book on the bed. ‘Why are the police involved?’

  ‘Because you have to tell them if you find human bones. They should really be properly buried in a graveyard.’

  ‘Couldn’t we just put them in with Great-grandma?’ asked Maisie. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t mind. We could poke them down to her.’

  ‘It doesn’t work like that, love.’ I smiled. ‘We have to let the police investigate.’

  ‘Are they there now?’ asked Ruby. ‘At Great-grandma’s house?’

  ‘Yes – well, they might have stopped for the night, but they’ve been digging there today. And the other thing you need to know is that, because people don’t find human bones in back gardens very often, some journalists came to film a story about it for the local TV news.’

  Ruby fixed me with a hard stare. ‘Is Great-grandma in trouble with the police?’ she asked.

  I was grateful that she was being careful about what she said in front of Maisie. ‘No, but the police have a duty to try to find out how those bones got there and who they might have belonged to.’

  ‘My bone still belongs to me, though, doesn’t it?’ asked Maisie.

  I sighed and shuffled up the bed a bit so I could hold her hand. ‘The policeman in charge asked me if he could have a look at the bone you found. It might help them with the investigation.’

  Maisie burst into tears. ‘But it’s my special fairy bone. I don’t want to give it back.’

  I leant over and hugged her to me, stroking her hair. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart. The policeman is going to take very good care of it for you. He said he’s got a daughter too.’

  ‘Is he going to give my fairy bone to her?’

  ‘No. They’re going to examine it properly and put it with the others.’

  ‘Will I get it back?’

  I shut my eyes, wishing I was anywhere but having this conversation. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.’