I’m not going to go to court. Nicholls told me the other morning, sitting at my kitchen table in his suit, after driving round on his own. He’d heard through people he’d worked with at the Crown Prosecution Service: no one wants to prosecute a mother acting in clear self-defence. There’s a lot of attention on them, of course. Everyone from the broadsheets to breakfast shows wants to talk to me.
I have already talked until I am hoarse. The police have been polite but thorough, running through my story again and again. But they believed me from the start – I could see it in their eyes. Sophie and Teddy have been treated with kid gloves, of course, assigned social workers and ‘given time to heal’, as they put it. In time, if she wants, she can tell their story to the world.
That morning, I thought Nicholls would go after passing on the news and asking after them both. They were playing in the garden and we’d watched them for a moment through the window, while we drank our coffees. But he didn’t seem in a rush to leave, so I just brought it up. A lot had become clear to me by then, from the police officers who interviewed me and what was written in the papers, but I wanted to hear it from him. It was the first chance I’d had to speak to him properly – he’d had to step away from the case, once it became clear that what happened to Nancy and Sophie fell under one investigation.
‘You know, for a moment, I thought it was you who took Sophie,’ I said. ‘I saw that school photo, of you and Nancy, and realised – you’re Jay.’
He didn’t speak for a second. ‘I was Jay,’ he said slowly. ‘After we left – my family moved down south – no one called me that any more. It was supposed to be a fresh start. But I always liked it here.’ He turned to me. ‘Heath would have been in that photo too, if you’d had time to look at it. He probably realised that.’
‘If I’d had time …’ I remembered, again, that wary look on Heath’s face when I told him it was Jay – Nicholls – who’d been keeping Sophie at Parklands, revealing that I didn’t suspect him. I think it was then that he changed his mind about what he was about to do to me. ‘I suppose it was safer to get me to that isolated building, rather than do anything there.’
But I did get one thing right: it wasn’t entirely coincidental that Nicholls was looking into Sophie’s case.
‘It struck a chord, I suppose. That was partly why I got into policing. I felt like no one was looking out for her after she left.’ He grimaced a little. ‘I mean Nancy, of course.
‘Though I didn’t exactly advertise that part of my past. They said we’d argued – we hadn’t. But people talk.’ I nodded. And I wondered if Heath, unnoticed, didn’t help it along a little.
‘I transferred forces, back up here, a few years ago. I was on major investigations, working nearer the city centre. I hadn’t really heard about Sophie, until all this. I moved to this division about a year ago now, working closer to Amberton and, well, where I grew up.
‘So when Sophie’s call came through’ – he rubbed the back of his head – ‘it felt close to home, in a lot of ways. I wanted to make sure there was nothing more we could do. But it seemed quite clear cut. And when the diary emerged, suggesting it was her pregnancy and her crappy boyfriend’ – I smiled to hear him sound less than perfectly professional – ‘I thought, no wonder this kid doesn’t want to come home.’
‘I could tell.’
He frowned. ‘I shouldn’t have communicated that. But I had wondered if something like that had happened to Nancy. That she was scared of what her parents might do, or say.’
‘That’s what Heath wanted everyone to think. That we’d failed Sophie.’
‘Yes. But still … something about it – it was too neat, that diary emerging when it did. So I kept an eye on it all. When you said someone had been in your garden, and I realised where you lived, I came and looked round Nancy’s house—’
‘Where I saw you,’ I interrupted. ‘I thought you seemed …’
‘Shifty,’ he fills in for me. ‘Maybe. I told myself I was just doing my job, but it was more than that. It made me think – what could I have done differently, after Nancy disappeared. Because it had never made sense to me. Anyway, I kept paying attention. When I saw the repeat caller records, it seemed like you were …’
‘Losing it,’ I said bluntly. ‘And you knew about my past.’
‘Your husband had mentioned it, when he came in to discuss the diary.’ He looked down. I could imagine the spin Mark put on all that. It’s easier to blame someone else than to look at your own failings.
And of course there was Heath, all the time, pouring poison in my family’s ears.
That’s another thing that’s come out. After I’d overdosed, I’d given permission for him, as my GP, to liaise with my family. He’d said it was a good idea. And I’d never rescinded it, I had never even thought. So he’d been hiding behind a veil of concern, updating them on my mental health, encouraging them to check in with me and him – in case, say, I reacted badly to Mark’s new girlfriend, had they heard about that, actually? Not to alarm them, oh, not at all, but he did have a few worries …
He was finding out what I was up to and, later, laying the ground. So if something were ever to happen to me …
Everyone trusts a doctor, after all.
People have suggested, tactfully, that I might have been mistaken: that I could be reading too much into my dreams. And maybe I’ll never know for sure. That dark figure I’d dream about, leaning over my bed … The police said that it would have been very unlikely, that it was too big a risk for him to take, to enter my house more than once.
But I know. I remember that night I woke up to find that presence, waiting, breathing, on the other side of my bedroom door – expecting me to be asleep. He’d told me to keep taking the pills.
Heath used to park up in that back road behind Parklands, they think, to go and see Sophie, using that cut-through that Nicholls mentioned that time I saw him outside. And if anyone did see the doctor’s car parked in a road nearby, well, nothing to worry about, GPs do house calls at odd times.
They think he cut himself a copy of the keys to Parklands long ago. Perhaps even when Nancy lived there: a teenage boy lifting his mum or step-dad’s keys from the dish in the hall one quiet afternoon.
‘It was a strong cover,’ said Nicholls, bringing me back to the bright morning. ‘But when I learned that you’d reported another break-in, I kept going – I told you I’d look into it. Finally, we got the phone records. It takes weeks, you see.’
‘And?’
‘And the call was untraceable, as I expected. It was just a mobile number that called you at the helpline, at the time that you said. The phone wasn’t registered to anyone, but that’s not surprising, if it’s just pay as you go. It had been used fairly locally – the call had gone through a mobile phone tower not too far from here. But they cover a wide area.’
‘The coverage is bad out here,’ I added.
‘Still, something just felt wrong. You see, the phone had only ever been used that night: two calls, just a few moments apart.’
‘The test call, to check I was there—’
‘And then Sophie was on the line. I was thinking about it, actually, when your sister called me to say she couldn’t find you, and I came straight round. But I’m sorry. I was almost too late.’
‘I felt like you were always warning me off,’ I said.
‘A bit. It’s easier to investigate without …’ He trailed off. ‘But it wasn’t just that. I was uneasy about this one. It reminded me too much of the past. But I thought I was letting it distract me from the task at hand.’
I changed the subject. ‘And you hadn’t seen him – Heath – since school?’
‘No. Even then I could barely have told you his name, to be honest, let alone where he grew up. I didn’t know about him and Nancy. No one did.’
Other stuff has started to come out now, sometimes in the papers, sometimes the police let me know. After medical school Heath went abroad, then he’d moved around, losing his soft Cheshire accent in the process, it seems. There were complaints filed, suggestions of inappropriate relationships with a couple of young patients. Overly friendly. But then he’d move on, to another locum position. When he eventually settled back in Amberton, he had kept himself to himself. So no one at the surgery would have thought to check if one of the quiet young doctor’s elderly patients was his mother – and that was only an irregularity, anyway.
But then Heath learned that Nicholls was looking into Sophie: I’d told him myself. And I bet he remembered him. It must have felt like the threat of discovery was getting too close.
‘How is Mrs Green doing?’ Nicholls asked, breaking into my thoughts.
‘Lily’s OK, I think. It’s hard to tell, but she seems much brighter. Clearer.’
We don’t really know what Heath intended with the drugs he gave her. He’d said that whenever she felt a bit lost or forgetful, she should take a pill. They kept her confused, certainly. But perhaps she’d been harder to manage than Heath thought. Asking too many questions about the little boy, or maybe my friendship worried him – what might she let slip? How easy it would have been for her to get mixed up, and take too much of her powerful medicine.
Because he’d been putting out feelers, they say, about locum work outside Cheshire, they think he was going to start again somewhere, with Teddy. They searched his house, a neat semi on the edges of Amberton, and found some of the stuff from the attic: Teddy’s clothes and toys, in bags in the loft.
It took a while to find out who Lily thought Teddy actually was – I didn’t want to upset her.
‘Such a good boy,’ she’d said, a little wistfully. ‘A good boy, underneath.’ She was talking about Heath. He’d told her that Teddy’s mother was a vulnerable patient, who just needed a little extra help looking after him. But she couldn’t tell anyone. ‘The authorities, you know,’ she told me, her eyes owlish. ‘They might take him away.’
And it was the truth, in a way. Heath was hiding his secret in plain sight. She’d long ago learned not to talk about her son, who liked to keep his humble background quiet. Handy, too, when he returned to Amberton, that no one would ask awkward questions.
Yet I wonder how much she knew about him, or had guessed at over the years. I remember the way she pretended not to know who Nancy was, the first time I asked. Of course, a housekeeper would have learned not to gossip about the family she worked for, and later to dodge curiosity about the painful past. And yet. I know how far we’ll go to protect the people we love.
In the end, I let it drop.
They had her new social worker break it to her that he was gone, but I know she spared Lily exactly how. She seems to think that Heath got mixed up in a fight. She gets confused, even now, but she’s out of hospital, where they put her under observation. She’s been moved into a new flat, where she’s with people who can look after her if she needs it, and we come and see her, Teddy and I, and even Sophie’s been once. I helped set it up: Heath’s estate went to Lily, as it should have. He’s had to go away, I tell her if she asks, and once – and I hope she’d forgive me the lie – ‘Oh, he sends his love.’
They found some of Sophie’s stuff, too, a bit later. He’d already taken it to the tip. If I’d done what he wanted, at the end … I don’t think he’d have kept her.
Suddenly I don’t want to think about any of this any more. I get up and put the kettle on again.
‘So. Got any more safety talks planned at the Grammar, then? Maureen will be delighted.’
Nicholls looks surprised, then laughs. ‘Maybe. You should probably be giving one too.’