KATE
They found Nancy.
It was Nicholls who decided to dig in the building we’d been in – I heard Kirstie mentioning it to another officer. She’s back, helping us again. It was a hunch, but a correct one: to check what was under that compacted earth floor, why Heath had thought to pick that place to take Sophie, after he emptied the attic. And it was the way Heath operated, repeating himself, retracing his steps – trying to make the present fix his past.
I feel so sorry for Nancy’s sister, Olivia. It’s one thing to suspect that someone you love is never coming back, but to know, for sure …
She wasn’t buried deep. They couldn’t be sure how he’d done it, but from what we know of him – he’d strangled her. They think she just went to meet him there in the park, after everyone was asleep. They’d probably met there before. Teenagers looking for somewhere to go.
But this time, only he came back.
He could have taken either his step-dad’s keys or his mum’s – Lily’s – to get into Nancy’s house. They’d both have had a set, working there all the time. No one knew about him and Nancy: it seems it would have been awkward, to say the least, if her parents had found out she was seeing the son of the help. I wonder, perhaps, if she liked it a little bit – the excitement of a secret.
Afterwards, he just kept on as he always had, fading into the background, unnoticed. Maybe he helped the rumours about Jay along, we can’t really know. I think, given what he did to me, that he did.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. So much has happened since then. Since Sophie came back.
My house was very full. There were lights in the drive as more cars pulled up, people swarming around, asking so many questions. Someone had put a blanket over me. I found I was shivering as the summer night drew in, my hands shaking visibly.
I had, finally, silenced Charlotte. She couldn’t get a full sentence out. ‘Kate, I was so worried …’ She crouched down in front of me to pass me another cup of tea. Her face was pale. ‘You weren’t here, but your car was here. I thought …’
‘I know. I’m OK. We’re OK.’ But I almost couldn’t believe it either.
And there, in the middle of it all, the sun that we were all revolving around, was Sophie, right next to me on the sofa in our living room. Even the police felt it – I could hear it in their voices: something like awe. Teddy was in her lap, the little boy wide-eyed at all these people. She’d given him the remote control to play with – he loves pushing buttons – while I did the talking, Sophie quiet by my side. At one point, amid all the bustle, she fell asleep. She must have been exhausted.
Two years, three months and eleven days, she’d played that waiting game, seizing her chances, finding chinks in his armour. The message on the call to me. The email address in the diary. The drawings on the postcards. And then her last rebellion before the end came, so simple it looked like stupidity. It was stupid, so clumsy, so risky, it still scares me to think of it – her dropping the fizzy drink, hoping that it would be ready to explode, shaking his concentration just for a second.
Her eyes telling me to do it – to take our last chance.
They had an officer with Lily, I’d checked.
It had fitted together like pieces of a jigsaw. ‘My little boy.’
She hadn’t been imagining things; she was muddled, yes, but it was more than that: those drugs, keeping her more confused than she should be, dulling her natural sharpness.
And then there were my dreams, where I’d heard that childish laughter that sounded just like Sophie. Of course it did. It was Sophie’s baby. ‘He took him out, sometimes,’ she told us. ‘At night.’
But Heath hadn’t always been outside. He’d taken Teddy to Lily’s, too. It let him control Sophie, allowing him to do things without a little boy around. And it got Teddy used to being looked after by someone else. So that’s where Heath had decided to leave him, in the end. Before he …
To break my thoughts, I leant forward and gave Charlotte a squeeze. ‘Really, I’m OK. Have you got hold of Dad yet, to let him know?’ I wanted to distract her from her fretting.
Because she came through for me, in the end. She’d come round that afternoon, as she’d told me she would, only to see my car in the drive, and me not answering the door. She let herself in, and found the place empty. She probably missed us by just a few minutes.
Next she tried to get through to my phone, ringing unanswered in the footwell of his car. Charlotte had panicked: at what I might have done. ‘Something stupid,’ is all she’ll say. So she’d called 999, and they’d sent round two officers in a patrol car. But that wasn’t enough for her; she’d gone into the kitchen and seen Nicholls’s card, tucked by the phone. She called him too.
So they were already looking for us, a patrol car parked in my drive, when we drove up in Heath’s car and ran into Lily’s cottage. It was PC Kaur, the officer who’d been round to check after the intruder in my house, who found us there. His mouth dropped open when he saw me, covered in blood; it got wider still when he took in Sophie behind me, her ghostly pallor, and the little boy in her arms, his blond curls too long.
‘There is a body in the park,’ I told Kaur, ‘in the outhouse nearest the car park. It’s Dr Heath.’
And I just kept repeating it, throughout, as more people arrived, gathering in the drive. ‘Dr Heath,’ I keep saying, ‘he did it. He took Sophie.’
Then I saw Nicholls, coming out of my house, his suit crumpled.
‘And he killed Nancy,’ I said, over their heads. He stopped right there. He looked young for a second, just like his school picture. He really didn’t know, I realised.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said more softly. ‘She’s dead. And he did it. Nick Heath.’