Page 86 of 59 Minutes

FRANKIE

ONE YEAR LATER ST JAMES’S PARK

Janet’s daughter recoils slightly. She looks considerably older than she did in the picture, so washed out she’s almost monochrome where she was luminous and golden in Janet’s hallway. ‘How do you know my name?’ she says. Her voice is barely audible, the same soft accent Janet had.

Frankie can barely speak. ‘I … I didn’t expect to … I’m sorry, I—’

Carrie backs away, just a tiny step. ‘Who are you?’ she whispers. ‘Are you … did the family send you?’ She looks behind her, a whip-crack movement.

‘What family?’ Frankie says, frowning and looking around too.

‘The—’ Carrie stops and stands straighter. She steps slightly closer, reclaiming the ground she gave up. ‘I said, how do you know my name?’ Her expression has sharpened from bewilderment to determination and her voice is crisper, as no-nonsense as Janet had been.

I would like to look at that head wound before you pull the trigger.

‘I … these are for your mother, Janet.’ Frankie gestures to the flowers, ashamed at their inadequacy. ‘I’m so sorry, Carrie, I was there. At the end, I mean.’

‘You’re—’

‘I’m Frankie. Francesca Drake, the one who … yeah, I’m her. And I’m so … god, I’m just so, so sorry.’

‘Why?’ Carrie says, her voice painfully quiet again. ‘You didn’t kill her.’ Carrie looks tiny, a shrivelled little fist in a puffy coat. Even her long, limp hair seems too big for her.

‘No, I know I didn’t but it’s my fault he was there, Ash—’

‘Don’t say his name,’ Carrie says.

‘Okay, I’m sorry. But he followed me, your mum was helping me and—’

‘Followed you from where?’

‘The truck. The place where he … where we all crashed.’

‘Are you saying that he knew you were there, at my mum’s?’ Carrie’s eyes search Frankie’s face.

‘I don’t … I don’t actually know.’

‘And he grabbed you in the first place, right? That’s why you were in the truck?’

‘Yeah, well, one of his brothers did. Ash … he was driving but, yeah—’

‘So would you have been at my mother’s house that afternoon if they hadn’t grabbed you?’ The words are conciliatory but the tone is angry, accusing.

‘No,’ Frankie says, ‘but I still chose her house and I begged her to let me in.’

‘I can’t … I don’t have the bandwidth for someone else’s guilt,’ Carrie says. ‘Especially when it’s misplaced.’

Frankie swallows. ‘Okay then,’ she says. ‘No more apologies.’

‘Good.’

The park is filling up now. People arrive with fold-up chairs and cool boxes, a tuk-tuk selling coffee rolls along the path and settles near the playground.

‘Those flowers are nice,’ Carrie says.

Frankie looks at them in her hand. Roses hand dyed a liquorice purple, dried cream lilies, dusty blue hydrangeas, hazel wood sticks, and a binding of forget-me-nots – those waxed rather than dried – wound throughout the chunkier flowers.

She sets them down at the seam of the wall, below Janet’s name.

They jostle for space with other bouquets for other names, all at different states of decay.

‘I hope she’d have liked them,’ Frankie says, then winces at such a trite thing to say.

Carrie smiles, though it looks like it causes her pain. ‘Bit trendy for my mum,’ she says, ‘but I like them.’ She looks at them again, stooping slightly to look closer. ‘Yeah actually,’ Carrie says, softly. ‘I really like them. I wasn’t sure before but … they’re special. Different.’

Frankie smiles then. An uneasy silence falls, neither woman knows how to end this moment.

After a pause, Frankie asks, ‘Where’s your little girl?’

‘She’s with her fairy godfather,’ Carrie says, looking at her wrist as if she was wearing a watch. ‘And I should be getting—’ But then she frowns. ‘How did you know I had a little girl?’

‘Oh god, sorry.’ What were you thinking, Frankie, you moron. ‘Your mum … she showed Ashley, sorry, she showed him a picture of you and your partner and your little girl, just before—’

‘Why the hell would she do that?’

Why did Frankie have to pick at this scab, telling Carrie about her mother’s final moments when they’d just about made it through this accidental meeting in one piece?

‘Well,’ she says, trying to find the words. ‘Your mum was … asking … begging him to stop.’ Carrie visibly shudders but Frankie ploughs on. ‘She was trying to get him to think about who he’d be hurting, who he had in his life that—’

‘ His life? What are you talking about?’

‘I really had no idea,’ Frankie says. ‘I couldn’t believe it when Janet said it, it was such an awful coincidence.’

‘What was?’

‘The way he was connected to you and your mum.’

Carrie sucks in a breath like she’s been punched in the gut. ‘What do you mean?’ she says, her eyes saucered.

‘What Janet said to him, to try to stop him, you know—’

‘No, I don’t know, what are you talking about?’

‘Did the police not …’ But did Frankie tell it all to the police word for word?

Did they even ask about who said what? The statement-taking and the fingerprints and the admin of murder, it was all a rush job.

Even the autopsy, a national crisis saw overworked pathologists joined by medical students scraped from universities and handed scalpels. This much Frankie does know.

‘Please,’ Carrie says, ‘what do you mean who he was to me and my mum?’ She looks frantic now.

‘Your mum, it’s just … She told him that …’ Frankie feels her mouth watering, a precursor to throwing up. How can she be telling this woman something so intimate about herself?

‘What?’ Carrie’s nostrils flare with anger now. ‘What?’ she hisses, stepping closer to Frankie.

‘She told him that … I mean, maybe it was bollocks or just the panic or something she just made up or …’

‘Oh no, she didn’t—’

‘She told him that your kid, your daughter … she said he was the father.’

Carrie recoils like she’s been shot. Eyes mirroring Janet’s in the split second after the bang. Frankie hadn’t seen a resemblance until now.

‘He knows?’ Carrie whispers. ‘He knows about my daughter?’

Frankie nods. Those eyes. She looks down.

‘He’s been trying to get letters to me and I’ve just …

I thought they were apology letters and I burned them.

Oh fuck,’ Carrie says, her face turning a yellow-grey as she staggers backwards into the handrail.

Frankie rushes forward and grips Carrie’s waist through her coat as her legs buckle.

Under the padding of the slippery coat, her body feels tiny, her breathing erratic. ‘He knows?’ Carrie says.

Frankie nods, just once. Their faces are inches apart. She can smell tea on Carrie’s breath.

‘Did you tell anyone else what my mum said? The police or … anyone?’

‘I don’t … I don’t know. I don’t think so. But like … isn’t it a motive?’

Carrie stares back at her like she’s insane. ‘I don’t care,’ she says. ‘No one can know. He can’t have my daughter, he can’t … none of that lot, they can’t have her.’

‘But he already knows,’ Frankie says, softly.

‘Who will believe him? If you don’t tell anyone that part, then he could just be making things up.’

‘But DNA tests? Couldn’t he … I don’t know, like ask for one?’

Carrie shakes her head. ‘Not until she’s an adult. I can refuse, I asked a solicitor back when … when I first found out I was pregnant.’

Carrie looks down at Frankie’s hands on her, ‘I’m okay,’ she says.

Frankie releases her carefully and steps back. What little colour Carrie had before has started to return to her cheeks.

‘Frankie,’ she says. ‘If you’re really as sorry as you say for what happened to my mum—’

‘I am, I’m so sorry.’

‘Then you’ll do something for me.’

‘What is it?’

I told them he did it on purpose. Isn’t that enough?

But the expression on Carrie’s face is one Frankie would know anywhere. A ladies’ toilet look. ‘Please don’t tell anyone what my mother told him, especially the court. No matter what he claims. Please.’

Frankie is standing by the church again, the voices of the Chagford Rock Choir a warm front against the cold, clean air. The truck door is opening, the men’s laughter ricocheting like rifle shots. Juno is shaking her head inside. These looks, they cannot be ignored.

‘Okay,’ Frankie says. ‘I won’t ever tell anyone. No matter what.’