Dead To Me

13

RYELANDS HOUSE WAS a converted Edwardian manse set in its own grounds near Phillips Park in Newton Heath. It would originally have been the mill owner’s property, built away from the cluster of narrow streets on the other side of the park. Nice view over the trees to the gasworks.

Janet had had dealings with the institution back when she was on Division. Mainly petty burglaries that led to the kids there.

The place was well maintained, with landscaped gardens and a play area in the large front plot. Shiny red double doors between the pillars of the porch leading into the house. Double-glazed and carpeted.

Marlene was the manager, had been for years. She remembered Janet and they exchanged pleasantries before getting down to business.

‘I liked her,’ Marlene said, ‘and she didn’t make it easy. I think, with more support, if she had been able to stay off the drugs, she might have done all right, but…’ she sighed. ‘The boyfriend, Sean Broughton – worst thing that could have happened. Lisa didn’t let anyone get close, trusted no one, and then rolled out the red carpet when he came along.’

‘What about the family? She spent some time with her mum?’ Janet had read through Rachel’s report on the interview with James Raleigh, noting the key facts ahead of this visit.

‘The mother tried, but, well, not exactly gifted with parenting skills. The acting out at the onset of puberty – Lisa wanted attention, she needed boundaries. The early disruption had left her quite damaged. Denise Finn didn’t have the wherewithal. Problems of her own. Then the brother’s suicide…’

‘He hung himself,’ Janet said.

‘From a lamppost outside his mother’s house.’

‘Oh, God.’ Janet tried to imagine it, opening the door or the curtains and seeing that, facing that, Taisie or Elise swinging. She squashed the thought. But how would you ever forget the image? The rope or the belt, the body suspended, still, the face distorted. How did you ever reach a place where the earlier, innocent photos of school and holidays came into your head, instead of the ghastly death mask?

Janet had sat with victims’ relatives in the past, heard them say, I just can’t get it out of my head, seeing her that way. Every time I close my eyes… One distraught young son had seen his mother beaten to death with a poker by her ex-husband: It’s stuck there, he cried, I can’t remember what she really looked like, she’s just gone. At least with Joshua, he’d looked peaceful, as if he was sleeping. Janet swallowed, fixed on what Marlene was saying.

‘Nathan had problems of his own, was off his head on everything going. He’d started shooting up, stealing off Denise, mugging people. We offered Lisa bereavement counselling. I think she went a couple of times.’

‘Tell me about Lisa’s drug use when she was here,’ Janet said.

Marlene raised her hands, a gesture of frustration. ‘It’s impossible to police. We’re a home, not a secure unit. Drugs are out there, they get in here. Lisa was caught with aerosols, glue, weed – well, most of them try weed,’ she said as an aside.

‘Any Class A?’

‘That only started once Sean came on the scene. We could see the signs. But she was never found with any.’

‘He supplied it?’

‘That’d be my guess,’ Marlene said.

‘James Raleigh had been talking to her about rehab,’ Janet said.

There was a scuffling sound at the door and it swung wide open. An Asian girl wearing an outsize tracksuit and a red baseball cap burst into the room. ‘Marlene? Oh, soz.’

‘I’ll be a few more minutes, Punam.’

‘Cool.’ The girl flicked a peace sign in their direction and left. Janet smiled; the energy, the liveliness, reminded her of Taisie on a good day.

‘She’s a doll,’ Marlene said. ‘She’ll make it.’ She stretched in her seat. ‘Lisa’s social worker, Martin Dalbeattie, retired this spring. We’ve still got his number – I’m sure he’d be happy to talk to you, if you needed to know any more details about her time here.’

Janet thanked her and would have left it at that, but Rachel’s persistent questions meant she had to ask. Just to convince herself there was nothing to it. ‘Sean Broughton – had he been around here before he latched on to Lisa?’

‘Don’t think so.’ Marlene thought harder. ‘No.’ She leaned forward, her head tilted, as if she’d share a confidence. ‘And I am the all-seeing-eye,’ she laughed.

It was a miracle Denise Finn was still talking and walking, given the trauma she’d been through. Where did she summon the strength to carry on? Perhaps after Nathan had died, she kept going for Lisa. But now? I couldn’t do it, Janet thought, I would just lay down and die, a bit of help maybe, from the car exhaust, stones in pockets, pills and booze. But it wasn’t true. She’d weathered hard times, survived. Not only with the baby, but before then. When she got ill.

Thinking of it brought the old, familiar tremor of anxiety. Like a faint aftershock from an earthquake, travelling from the soles of her feet to the crown of her head. She allowed herself to revisit the memories as she made the journey back to the office, having discovered that, if she tried to deny the feelings and not think about the events that had first triggered them, it only seemed to feed her fears, making them stronger, more feral.

Fifteen, studying for GCSEs and worried about her exams, Janet was finding it hard to sleep at night. They all expected her to do well. Her mother was sorting through a box of old photographs, one of her clean-ups. Janet at the dining-room table, trying to learn chunks of King Lear to regurgitate for the English Paper. Oh, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven…

‘Look at you there, then’ – her mother thrust an old school photograph under her nose – ‘butter wouldn’t melt.’

Janet glanced dutifully at the photo. Primary school, class picture. She was seated, cross-legged on the front row. She could remember the hall, which doubled as a gym, the parquet floor that stank of polish and feet. The way you could make squeaky noises as you walked, especially with your pumps on.

‘And there’s Veronica next to you.’

Janet grunted. Veronica had bad teeth, sort of greeny grey at the front, that reminded her of bread with mould on. She had a plastic coat that was meant to look like leather but didn’t. The coat squeaked too.

‘They never did find out who killed her,’ Janet’s mother mused.

Time stopped. Janet stared at the girl’s face; Veronica was grinning. ‘What?’

‘She was murdered,’ her mum said. ‘Awful.’

‘You said she’d gone away.’ Janet looked at her mother.

‘You were six,’ her mother said. ‘I wasn’t going to tell you what had really happened. You’d have been petrified.’

‘What did happen?’ Janet felt confused, angry.

‘She was abducted,’ her mother said, ‘on the way home from school one day. They found her in the woods, stuffed in a holdall.’

Her mum took back the photograph.

Janet tried to carry on with her revision, but it was impossible to concentrate. She brooded over it for the rest of the day: how could she not have known about a murder? But she realized that, aged six, she would not have watched the news, or read the papers. She used to walk home with Veronica sometimes. She remembered that. They weren’t best mates or anything, not in the same group at playtime, just lived in the same direction. One day, Veronica had been offered a lift. Janet said no – it had been drummed into them: Don’t take sweets from strangers, don’t go with a stranger, don’t get into a stranger’s car – but Veronica had known the driver. At least, that’s the impression Janet had got. But Janet knew that didn’t count for her. If she didn’t know the person herself, then she mustn’t get into the car. She had to say no. Was that the day of the abduction?

Janet felt sick. She laid awake half the night, trying to remember more, frustrated that she couldn’t. I should have stopped her, she thought, asked her who it was, if she really knew them. She might still be alive if I’d only done that.

Why hadn’t the police solved the murder? Why hadn’t they asked Janet about it? She could have described the car if it had been fresh in her memory.

The guilt grew like a fungus inside her. And the anxiety, the sensation of the floor heaving, something crawling up her spine, twisting in her belly.

In an effort to find out more, she went to Oldham Central Library and scoured the microfiche, nervous in case one of the librarians saw what she was looking up and told her off. She read what she could quickly, almost not wanting to know, the details lodging in her mind, her back tense, her mouth dry. A navy-blue holdall, a shallow grave, someone walking the dog, a brutal murder. They didn’t say exactly how Veronica died. What Janet didn’t know, she made up. Her darkest fantasies filling the vacuum.

The murder played over and over in her head like a reel of film. Veronica’s terror became her own. She felt the unease as the car drove away from town, the spittle of the killer on her face, his hand in her knickers, the soil in her nose and mouth.

She would open her biology textbook or King Lear – How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, To have a thankless child – and the words swam. What was the point?

Abandoning any hope of sleep, she tried to study through the night. Her head ached and she felt sick all the time. Her dad, sensing something was going on, tried to jolly her along: ‘Exams won’t last for ever, and then you can burn your books.’

‘She’ll do no such thing,’ her mother retorted. ‘She’s still got her A-levels to do.’

Janet pretended to be going to a friend’s and went to the doctor’s to ask if they could give her something to help her sleep. The doctor was very sympathetic, said she had a lot of people with exam nerves, but generally it was better to let nature take its course. A regular routine was good, no tea or coffee in the evening. At that point, Janet had burst into tears. The doctor calmed her down, asked if there was anything else. Janet considered telling her about Veronica, but decided it would sound crazy.

The doctor gave her a week’s supply of sleeping pills. Take one at bedtime. Get you back in the habit. They worked, pulling her down into a black velvet tunnel. But after the week was up, it was the same as before, lying there with the light on, her limbs rigid, the pictures rolling through her. Then it was her first exam.

She couldn’t go in the gate. She couldn’t do it. If she had to go and sit in the silent hall with the sound of the clock ticking and other people’s breathing and the pictures in her head – the disgusting thoughts in her head, Veronica with worms in her mouth – Janet knew all that stuff inside her head would escape. She would lose control, turn her desk over, shout obscenities, tell them all it was her fault.

And so Janet stood, humming with tension, while the pupils streamed into school. While the clock struck nine and the invigilator told them to turn over their papers. While her fellow pupils printed their names and began to read through the questions. She stood, cold and shaky. Where could she go?

‘Janet?’

Ade from down the road. Lower sixth. ‘You lost?’ He smiled, his little joke.

She began to shiver.

‘Shouldn’t you be in there?’

‘I can’t, I can’t…’ she stammered. Words failing. Janet failing.

‘OK.’ He came closer, concern in his face. But not fear. Why wasn’t he frightened? If he knew what she was thinking… She bit her knuckles, rocking forward.

He put his arm around her, it felt warm across her shoulders, safe.

‘Would you like to go home?’ he said.

She nodded.

‘OK, then.’ And he walked her back. He was so kind. Here she was, a total nutter, throwing a fit, and he didn’t freak or anything, just walked her back. Went in with her, made a cup of tea.

‘I’m scared,’ she told him, her eyes stinging, her body trembling, nerves singing. ‘I’m so scared, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.’

He put his hand on her arm. ‘Do you want me to ring the doctor?’

She had seen One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Felt a fresh lurch of fear. ‘What will they do?’

‘Don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘But they’ll try and help, yeah? What about your mum?’

‘No!’ Janet didn’t want her parents, didn’t want to have to explain. See the look on their faces when they knew she had missed her exam.

Ade shrugged and phoned the surgery for her. She was biting her hand again and she tasted blood.

He waited while they came and talked to her. Even when Janet let the panic free and began to hit at the table and talk too fast, he stayed.

And then he came to visit. Getting the bus three times a week. He made her smile, he brought her little treats, left her letters. He was solid. Unfazed. Their first kiss – on the psychiatric ward.

She got better, came home, re-did fifth form. Passed her exams the year Ade did his A-levels. He went to Leeds to do Geography. Janet had chosen Sociology, English and Biology at A-level. Courses that the careers service said would be useful for her ambition to join the police. She hadn’t saved Veronica, but maybe one day she could find out what had happened to her. Get her some justice. And if not for Veronica, then maybe she could do the same for other families.

Ade, her knight in shining armour. Not just then but later. She’d said as much to Gill in the long dark days after Joshua’s death: He rescued me.