“Just keep quiet about Stuart babysitting you here last night or they’ll take you away, Diana,” he said.
Being taken away was what Mum used to threaten me with when I talked back or came in late from playing. So I didn’t say anything. But they took me away anyway.
A nice lady asked me how old I was and where did I live. I said with Mum, like Phil had told me to say. But she went to see Mum and came back very angry.
“We’re going to go somewhere nice,” she said in the car. She’d held my hand on the long journey to Wales until it had got sweaty and uncomfortable and I pulled away.
I’d locked all that in a box, deep in my head. It was one night in my whole life, I told myself when I got old enough to think like that. I had to forget it and get on with living. I called myself Dee and grew into another person.
But I looked online later. Of course I did. The press coverage said that a teenage burglar, high on drugs when he broke into the million-pound house, had found Sofia Nightingale and her boyfriend there, bludgeoned him to death, and tied the girl up. He’d put a plastic bag over her head. “It was just to scare her,” Stuart had wept in his police interview. “She should have told me where the stuff was.”
She should have, I thought.
The girl wasn’t dead when we left. She was in a coma in hospital. Then I couldn’t find anything else. I thought she must have died. It was weird reading about it. But good weird. It felt as though it had happened to someone else. Not me. A story I’d heard somewhere.
Until Phil died. And I went to see Stuart. And saw Charlie’s passport.
I couldn’t quite believe it at first. Could it be him? Here in Ebbing? Someone I worked for? And liked?
I sat and wrote down what I knew: His real name was Williams, the same name as on the rent receipt I’d found in Phil’s notebook. But lots of people were called Williams.
The brain-damaged daughter in the home. He never said what had happened to her, did he?
And why had he taken a new identity? What was he hiding?
I had to be sure. I set up a new Yahoo! account—calling myself Addison1999—and contacted him anonymously. And he replied a couple of days later, asking for a meeting. And I knew. On the Sunday, I got the e-mail telling me to be in the car park. And I wasn’t sure at first. But I told myself it was in a public place where I’d be safe. And I wanted him to know he’d been found out.
That’s all. But he never came.
BEFORE
Seventy
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 18, 1999
Twenty years earlier
Birdie
Birdie was laughing at how clever she’d been when she saw the child in the doorway. It made her scream. A spooky child. Just standing there looking at her.
“Christ, what are you doing here?” she shouted.
But a man suddenly appeared and ran past the child and into the room. It was all going to shit.
Birdie had been stealing from her dad for months. First it was the occasional tenner, a packet of cigarettes, a bottle of Scotch. It’d been a game, really. She’d loved seeing how easy it was to trick him. He didn’t know her—he pretended he did with all that “darling Birdie” stuff but he’d lied to her and Mum. He needed to know he couldn’t just buy his way back into her life. But she’d liked the lovely things in the cabinets. Loved the mistletoe necklace he’d given her. So she tried it. A small silver rabbit. He’d never miss that. And she’d taken more. One thing at a time.
Until she’d overheard her father talking to someone on the phone while she waited to be taken out for a meal.
“Is it set up for the Saturday before Christmas? I’ll sort out the alarms when I leave for the dinner. He’ll have time. Tell him not to take the pictures. Harder to shift without drawing attention. Don’t screw this up!”
She’d known he was planning a burglary. An insurance fraud. Still conning people.
So she’d decided to stage her own. She’d done her research—seen how easy it was to sell pretty things. She’d sold a small silver pillbox she’d already taken. It had taken only twenty-four hours to find a buyer—a man in Germany. She’d DHLed it with a receipt signed with a scrawled “C Williams.”
Her new boyfriend had been a bit worried about it but she told Adam it was a practical joke on her Dad—she’d take it all back in the morning. She hadn’t needed to use the codes she’d found in her father’s desk to open the cabinets. The alarms were already switched off. They took everything they could fit in their pockets. She’d already rented a locker at a corner shop down one of the backstreets to stash it.