Page 61 of Cross Her Heart

‘Now, Mrs Hussey.’ Bray takes my arm but Simon gives me a tiny nod as they lead me to the door.

‘Can you tell me one thing?’ he asks. ‘When you spoke to this woman, Jodie’s mother, and her daughter, was it face to face?’

‘No,’ Bray says, after a pause. ‘It was on the phone. Amelia Cousins is in France and Jodie is on holiday in Spain.’

And then I’m gone, my face burning as she leads me out through the building, sending men up to search my room as we go, and I feel naked and exposed and humiliated and I’m once again in the back of a police car. Simon. All my hope now rests on Simon. It’s only as the car moves away that I remember where Katie and Charlotte were running away to. The seaside. Her grandfather’s house.Skegness.

63

LISA

It’s grey and raining in Skegness, the kind of fine drizzle that comes at an angle and gets in every pore. It suits me fine. No one is looking up, all either head down against the water or hunched under an umbrella. The sea churns a dirty blue to my left as I walk briskly along the seafront and the air is filled with salty spray. I dreamed of this as a child, being here with Katie. And now here we finally are.

The Crabstick Cafe isn’t on the main strip and I have to turn down three side streets before I reach Brown Beach Street, having flipped through anA–Zat the train station to find it, imprinting the directions on my lazy brain so used to having technology do this stuff for me. I sit at a table by the window and order a coffee. It’s the height of summer and the place should be busier, but the Formica tables are tired and chipped and the few customers look like broken, lonely people, reading papers and drinking tea because they can’t face the four walls at home any more. Residents, not tourists. No one looks my way.

There’s a TV on, up on the wall in the corner, a portable that must have been there for years, and behind the counter is a large hot-water urn. Further over, beside a noticeboard, is a pay phone. This is like a cafe from decades ago. Did Katie choose this place on purpose because it’s so old-fashioned? Is this part of her bringing us back to that moment in the past? And I’m here, so what now?

The waitress, a thickset woman in her mid-fifties wearing a housecoat, brings me over my mug of coffee and I stare out through the window. There’s a games arcade over the road, with a small group of teenagers huddled, bored, outside. Where is Katie? Is she in there watching me? Where is the next clue?

I feel sick with nerves. I need to find out where she’s got Ava and then call Marilyn. She can tell the police where to find me to get them. I don’t care if they shoot me on sight as long as they get Ava out safely. She’s the only good thing I’ve ever done with my life. They can do what they want with me.

I’ve drunk half my coffee, my impatience with Katie rising with every sip, when the noticeboard catches my eye again. It’s the kind that used to be in every supermarket before the Internet took over, little cards pinned on them advertising everything from second-hand cots to gardening services. I stare at it. A message board. Of course. I get up and go over to it, mug in hand to try to look casual.

‘Turn that up, love,’ a man grunts somewhere from a table behind me, and the waitress duly raises the volume on the TV. I’m not listening, but scanning the rows and rows of carefully printed adverts. The fragile care in some of the handwriting makes me think of old people and my heart squeezes with an emotion I don’t understand. Lost people. I know how they feel.

Finally I see it. Black ink on a blue card. My heart leaps to my mouth as I take it down.

Clyde! Call Bonnie! Let’s catch up!And underneath, a mobile number. My hands tremble. I’m so close. Katie is a phone call away.Avais a phone call away. I scrabble in my pocket for some change for the phone. I need to call—

‘…is believed to be Marilyn Hussey, a co-worker of Charlotte Nevill’s …’

Marilyn?

I look up at the TV.

‘… the police have made no statement at this time but our source tells us Ms Hussey was taken in for questioning from her place of work and has been harbouring the missing child murderer Charlotte Nevill, although it appears no arrest has been made there.’

A humming starts up in my ears as my heart races. Oh God, Marilyn. My lifeline. And now in trouble because of me. Will she tell them where I am? Will she even have figured out where I’ve gone from my message? As I stare at the screen and feel the blue card softening in my hand as I squeeze it, a calm settles over me. I have only me to rely on now. I could still phone the police. Once I’ve spoken to Katie and got some idea of where she and Ava are, I could ring them and they’d come so fast thinking they were going to arrest me. But how can I besureof where they are until I’ve seen my baby? What if the police go charging in looking for me and she’s not there? Katie will kill her. I know it. One betrayal too many.

My heart slows down to a regular steady beat and my skin cools. I can’t do anything to help Marilyn and I should never have involved her, but she’ll be okay. At worst, she’ll look like a fool, but I’m not sure how far they’ll want to go with prosecuting a woman just out of an abusive relationship. If this all goes wrong and they come for me, I’ll tell them I made her help me. They think I’m still the monster I used to be, they’ll believe it.

Maybe this is how it should be. Me and Katie. Finishing what we started, one way or another. I go outside and light a cigarette in the rain. A few moments of quiet before making the call. The smoke is harsh and it makes my head swim but it feels like coming home. Everything does. The anger and fear simmering inside me, the smoking, the being entirely alone with no one to believe in me.

It’s a perfect mood for Katie.

64

HER

The thing with your generation is you’re all so needy. Narcissistic. Instagram or it didn’t happen. But even with all that it took me a while to find you. You’d be surprised how many Avas of your age there are in Elleston. But I worked my way through them, all those little details of life casually given away, making it so easy to track someone down, and once I saw you with your mother, I knew I’d struck gold. It wasn’t the way she looked – I defy anyone to recognise a woman they knew as a child, we’re all masters of disguise – it was the way shewas. Nervous. Hunted. Edgy. Alone.

The waiting was over. I bought the house, and brought passport number three to life. Let a new identity build, watched you both and slowly integrated. Placed myself in the perfect position for studying Charlotte. Easy as pie. Of course this was when I really needed Jon. Nothim, obviously, but access to his life. I knew he wouldn’t have changed much – they’re all creatures of routine, aren’t they, and he didn’t have the spine for reinvention – and he was so pitifully glad to see me again. Not for long, obviously.

Once I’d got into your house it was so easy. I took fingerprints from glasses and stole strands of her hair from the bathroom and planted them at Jon’s so the police would think she’d been there. The same with the cottage I rented via his laptop and disposed of him in. I know he was your father, but don’t look at me like that. The man was both weak and a fool. You’d have been disappointed in him, trust me.

I set up a Facebook account for him, liked some of the same pages as you, and, when I was ready, started messaging you. Dear God, you were easy. So needy for love, little Ava. So determined to be a grown-up. You wanted romance. Passion. All that crap.

I wound your mother up too. Little surprises I knew would make her paranoid. Drive her to call her probation officer for reassurance while looking a little bit crazy. And then, when the time was right and the stage set, all it took was one shove of a toddler into the river and boom, a picture in the paper and an anonymous phone call saying I recognised her as Charlotte Nevill.

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