Page 29 of Worse Than Murder (DCI Matilda Darke Thriller #13)

I decide to go for a walk. I knew I shouldn’t have got involved in the investigation into the missing Pemberton twins.

I knew their story would set up home in my already full mind and take root.

Ever since I googled them and saw their innocent smiling faces looking out at me from the screen, I can’t stop seeing them.

Even though they were twins, they reminded me of me and Harriet when we were young girls, and those school photos we had where our mother had dressed us in near identical outfits because she thought we would look cute.

The memory brings a lump to my throat. My sister is gone.

She wants nothing more to do with me. I can understand why.

My actions have led to the murder of her sons.

I fucking hate you.

‘I fucking hate me, too,’ I say under my breath.

And now, it seems, I’m bloody seeing things.

There is no car at the bottom of the lake.

But there is. I’m so sure I saw a car. Had I imagined it?

Has finding a registration plate put pieces of a jigsaw together that don’t belong together to reveal a picture that makes no sense?

Am I losing my mind due to the heavy grief I’m suffering?

If so, what next? Where do I go from here? Is there a chance of recovery?

‘Matilda?’

I jump at the sound of my name and literally scream out loud.

‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’

I turn and see Alison Pemberton standing in the doorway of a picture-postcard cottage.

‘No. That’s fine. I was… I was miles away.’

‘What are you doing round here?’

I look around me. I have no idea where I am. I’m walking in the middle of an unmarked road, flanked either side by mismatched stone-built cottages.

‘I just thought I’d take a walk, discover more of the village,’ I lie, unconvincingly. ‘Do you live here?’

‘Yes. This is home. I was actually born in the back bedroom. Never lived anywhere else,’ she says with a smile. ‘Do you want to come in?’

‘Sure.’

I walk towards the house and up the small pathway.

As I step closer to the cottage, I see it’s not picture-perfect at all.

The door surround is crumbling, the garden needs weeding, the windows need replacing and the chimney stack looks precarious.

This house may hold memories for Alison, but they are all sad and dark and have leached into the building.

When I step inside, I can feel the intensity of the emotion shroud me.

I wonder if my own home back in Sheffield feels like this.

Alison closes the door and shows me into the living room off the small hallway. The ceilings are low, the walls painted dark, giving the room a cosy, yet claustrophobic feel. The furniture is clearly too big for the room. With no windows open and no air coming through, it’s oppressive.

I sit down. ‘You all lived here then? Two parents and three children?’

‘Yes. A tight squeeze,’ Alison says, sitting on the opposing armchair.

‘It must be full of memories for you.’

‘Not really,’ she says, looking around her. ‘I can’t remember much. I was only five when my sisters were taken. I’ve got photographs but they’re just pictures, aren’t they? Sometimes it’s like I’m looking at strangers.’

‘Do you remember your dad much?’ I ask, looking at the framed photo on the mantle.

‘Bits,’ she eventually says. ‘I’m not sure what are real memories and what I’ve invented.

He’s my dad, I want to remember him as being a happy, loving man, but I know he was depressed.

I know he had dark days. I sometimes picture him in this room smiling and laughing, but I don’t think it’s real.

I think it’s something I’m trying to convince myself of. ’

‘The sightings of your dad?—’

‘I’ve kept a record,’ Alison interrupts.

She jumps up and goes to an antique desk in the corner of the room.

From the top drawer, she brings out a box file.

‘I’ve kept all the newspaper clippings, and I’ve printed things I’ve found online about the investigation and missing people.

Carl Meagan was missing for four years. He was found by a fluke, wasn’t he?

My mum keeps telling me I should forget about it, but it’s not totally impossible that my dad is still out there, is it? ’

‘No. It’s not,’ I say, sceptically. I take the box file from her and open it. I bypass the newspaper cuttings and take out a plastic folder of all the sightings Alison had made a record of.

I read the first page and put it back in the file.

‘There are so many others, and they all say a similar thing. In the early days, he was wearing the same clothes Dad was on the day he disappeared. It’s not a coincidence, is it?

I mean, I know I want him to be alive and you’re probably going to say something like I’m wishing this to happen, but it’s not me who’s made these sightings.

These are real people who have no connection to us. ’

‘Why was there no CCTV at the bank?’

‘I don’t know. It was a long time ago, nobody can remember.

There’s another thing as well,’ Alison says.

She sits next to me on the sofa. She takes the file and begins spreading out the sheets of paper with all the recorded sightings of her father.

‘Look at this: Christmas Eve 1995, he was spotted outside High Chapel. March 12, 1996, and over the page, March 12, 1997.’

‘What’s so special about March 12?’

‘It’s my birthday. He came back to the village to see me on my birthday.’ She looks at me hopefully. She’s willing me to agree with her.

‘What about subsequent birthdays?’

Alison deflates. ‘The sightings do become fewer and further between as time goes on, but the sightings are nearly always around the time something’s happened.

My first day as a police officer, he was spotted in the grounds of Gilpin Hotel.

The day Mum and Uncle Iain got married, he was spotted in Storrs. There’s a pattern.’

‘What do you think happened to your dad?’

Alison sits back on the sofa. Her face softens. She swallows her emotion, and it’s a while before she braves herself to talk. ‘He was depressed. He couldn’t cope with losing his girls, and he walked away. I can understand that. I only… I wish… I wish I’d been enough for him,’ she cries.

I should put my arm around her. Alison needs a hug and I’m the only one here, but I’m the last person to be offering support right now. I hitch up closer to her. I put my left arm around her shoulders. Maybe to her it feels comforting. To me, it feels alien, and I don’t know why.

‘The fact he’s been spotted around important events in your life shows that you were enough for him, more than enough.

He couldn’t cope with what life had thrown at him and he needed to get away, but that didn’t mean he stopped loving you.

What happened was something neither of us can understand.

It killed your dad. He couldn’t cope with life, and he wanted to step away from that.

I bet he would have loved to have taken you with him, but he knew the best place for you was with your mother. ’

‘You think he’s still alive?’

I remove my arm. It feels plain awkward now.

‘Twenty-six people can’t be wrong, can they?’

She shakes her head. ‘Why doesn’t he make contact, then?’

‘I don’t know.’ I shrug. ‘Maybe he’s ashamed.’

‘What of?’

‘Maybe he thinks he’s failed at being a father for walking away. Maybe he’s worried you’d hate him for leaving.’

‘I’d never hate him.’

‘He doesn’t know that. And, as time has gone on, the hurt and the fear and the horror has mutated in his mind. He’s been living with it all non-stop for almost thirty years. He doesn’t need you to hate him, because he’ll hate himself.’

I know exactly how he feels.

Alison makes us both a cup of tea. I look out of the kitchen window at the field at the back of the house.

‘Was that where your sisters disappeared from?’

‘Yes.’

Alison unlocks the back door, and we step out into the coolness of the evening air.

The ground is soft under foot after the deluge of rain in the storm. We go onto the field and take in the expanse of space.

‘It’s smaller than I remember it as a child,’ Alison says. ‘When we were kids, this seemed to stretch on forever. There weren’t many children living here then. Celia and Jennifer, me and Claire, it was like this was our own private garden. Just for us.’

I turn back to the house. ‘Your mum said she was baking. So, she would have been at the window looking out.’

‘Yes. She could see us from there.’

‘But she didn’t notice anything was amiss until she shouted you in for your lunch,’ I say, almost to myself. ‘How long was it after your saw Celia and Jennifer in the back of the car before your mum called you in?’

Alison shakes her head. ‘I’ve no idea. I don’t think I had a concept of time back then.’

‘But you played on your own?’

‘Yes. I had this sausage dog on a string. I took him everywhere with me.’

‘You were on your own for a while?’

Alison screws up her face as she thinks. ‘I think so. I remember being hungry. I was asking for my dinner and Mum was in a flap about Celia and Jennifer.’ She wipes a tear away. ‘I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.’

I look across the field. ‘Was there a gap in the hedgerow back then?’

‘Yes. It’s not there now. The hedges have overgrown, but there was a gap you could cut through to the road. Mum said we weren’t allowed to go on our own because there’s a blind corner. You can’t always see cars coming from the right.’

‘So, why did you go through the hedge?’

‘I heard a car.’

‘But you must have heard cars all the time while you were playing. What made you go through that particular time?’

Alison shakes her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you hear anything else?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘So, you went out onto the road. You looked left and right, and you saw the car driving away?’

‘Yes.’

‘Left or right?’

‘Left.’

‘You’re sure? In the interview you gave with the specialised police officers, you said you couldn’t remember which direction.’

She thinks again. ‘No. It was left. I’m absolutely positive. I looked left and Jennifer and Celia were in the back of the car, and it was driving away as if towards the main village.’

‘You waved?’

‘Jennifer waved first. I waved back.’

‘They weren’t crying or anything?’

‘No. They… they looked how they always did. Relaxed. Happy.’

I want to ask her about the colour and make of the car or if she saw someone in the front, but I know Alison had undergone extensive interviewing as a child to try to get her to remember and it hadn’t worked.

I also know that Alison will have spent the past twenty-nine years beating herself up to try to force herself to remember the colour of the car at least. Any memory now can’t be trusted.

‘When you were back in the house and your mum realised your sisters were missing, what did she do? Who did she call first?’

Alison sucks in her lips. She looks up as she searches her memory. ‘She rang around a lot of people. I remember her being on the phone a lot.’

‘Who was the first person to come to the house?’

‘Uncle Iain.’

‘Did he come alone?’

‘No. Travis Montgomery came with him.’

‘And your dad?’

Her face takes on a pained expression as she tries to remember.

‘I… I don’t know. He worked at Dudgeons, and they were on strike at the time.

There was nobody in the office answering the phones and they didn’t have mobiles back then.

I don’t think he came home until much later.

By the time he did, the house was full of police. ’

I don’t say anything.

‘I’m not stupid, you know,’ Alison says, her voice much sterner. ‘I know what you’re thinking. I know what everyone else in the village is thinking, too. Dad took my sisters. He killed them for whatever reason and did a runner.’ She turns on her heel and heads back into the cottage.

I follow.

‘I’m not thinking that at all, Alison. I don’t know your dad. I don’t know your family. All I do know is that there are plenty of unanswered questions and the only person who I can ask them to is you.’

‘Why me?’ she asks, turning to face me. We’re in the kitchen, standing beneath the dull strip-lighting. Alison’s face is wet with tears.

‘Because you were the only eyewitness to two tragic events. You were there when your sisters were taken, and you were there when your father disappeared. You know what happened.’

Alison slumps into a chair at the table. ‘But I can’t remember,’ she says, her words almost lost to her tears. ‘I’ve tried. I can’t remember anything.’

‘Because you don’t want to.’

‘Why wouldn’t I want to?’

I leave the question unanswered. The reason why Alison can’t remember is because she’s afraid of the truth.