Page 25 of Stolen Ones
Claire followed Kim’s gaze to the photo above the fireplace. It wasn’t a professional shot. It looked like a selfie of the three of them that had been enlarged. Claire was in the foreground beaming. Her late husband had been totally buried in the sand up to the neck, and Grace was sitting on his sandy stomach, laughing.
‘Our last day of innocence,’ she said, smiling at the image. ‘That was taken three days before we found out that Richard’s headaches were due to an inoperable tumour on his brain. They gave him seven months, and he managed nine. Every single day of those months was precious.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Kim said, feeing the emotion gathering in her throat.
‘We knew it was coming but it didn’t make our loss any easier. When Richard died, I lost the house that we’d bought when we both had reasonable careers and a bit of spare cash in the bank. Richard wasn’t insured, so together with my leave of absence from work and funeral costs, the house had to go. We were left with nothing and were homed here by the council. We fell lucky. It’s a decent area, and Grace has more friends than she had at the old house. It was all very difficult at first, dealing with the hole in our lives and moving here. Those early days were indescribable. Battling through the physical pain that comes from loss. The relentless ache that suffocates your torso, the feeling that you can’t go through another hour without breaking down, but Grace’s courage got me out of bed every morning with the hope that maybe today would be just that little bit easier. I remember a turning point for us both.’
Kim said nothing and took the time to just listen to how this small family had regrouped after their tragic loss.
‘Grace asked me when it would be okay for her to laugh again. A young boy had been making silly faces in the classroom to cheer her up and it had made her chuckle, and then she’d felt bad about it. We made a pact that day that we would never hide our feelings from each other. If we wanted to laugh, we would laugh, and if we wanted to cry, we would cry. We gave each other permission to smile again and to remember all the good times we’d had. We talk about him every day, and we keep his memory alive for each other.’
Kim swallowed down the aching in her throat. This family had been through enough. They had faced the worst possible tragedy and had come out of it a team, mother and daughter supporting each other in their own way. They had been ripped apart at a time when they needed each other more than ever.
Kim couldn’t help thinking of her relationship with her own mother. A woman who had tried to kill both her and her twin brother almost from the moment they’d been born. Her most vivid memories entailed trying to keep her mother’s hands off Mikey – in her worst psychotic hallucinations, she’d thought he was the reincarnation of the devil. A woman now living out the remainder of her years at a home for the criminally insane.
She couldn’t think of her birth mother without also thinking of Erica though, the woman who had fostered her from age ten to thirteen. A truly selfless woman who had given her everything and expected nothing.
She had known that bond, had felt that love, however briefly.
The visit with Claire had made her even more determined than before that she would return Grace to her mother.
She had to.
Fourteen
‘Enjoy your supper?’ Kim asked, pulling alongside Penn’s vehicle outside the Wombourne home of Steven Harte.
The village was known as a peaceful environment with a population of 14,000. The green space at the centre of the area was surrounded by independent shops and was the hub of the village. Although a part of South Staffordshire, many of its population travelled the few miles into the Black Country and Wolverhampton for work.
Penn smiled and patted his stomach. ‘No movement from inside the house, boss. Should be a quiet night.’
‘Okay, get off home.’
She waited for Penn to pull away before sliding into his position. She thought better of it and pulled forward, blocking the gate. If he wanted to leave his home in the dead of night, he’d have to ram her out of the way to do it.
‘Come on, boy,’ she said, undoing Barney’s seat belt. He squeezed through the gap and plonked himself on the passenger seat, then looked forward, as if to say, ‘What now?’
‘This is it for the next few hours, matey. We just gotta sit and watch.’
She took a moment to assess the property. She’d passed through the village a mile before turning off the main road and onto a single-track lane that wound and turned for a good half mile. She’d passed one other property close to the other end of the lane, and there was no further road beyond this house. It was a dead end. It was isolated, remote and there was no risk of through traffic. There were no close neighbours to hear any noise and little chance of meeting anyone on the road.
‘What did you say, Barney? You need to go?’ she asked, reaching to the back seat for his lead.
She needed to get a feel for the place beyond what she could see.
She clipped Barney’s lead on, and he jumped out of the car. The first thing that hit her was the silence. Rarely was she anywhere with such a deep, dark silence. Even in the early hours of the morning at her home there was a hum of something in the distance. She’d walked Barney many times in the middle of the night, and never had she felt such a thick, overpowering sense of nothingness.
She took her torch from the boot of the car. Every sound she made was magnified.
‘Okay, boy, let’s go this way,’ she whispered, stepping out of the light cast by two ornamental lamp-post tops fitted to the stone pillars either side of the wooden gate. She was not going to see anything beyond those gates or the stone wall.
There had to be a break in the perimeter somewhere. She continued walking slowly to where the tarmac ended and wild bushes rose up out of shrubbery. She felt along the wall as Barney explored all the new smells that assaulted his powerful nose.
‘Aha,’ she said as her fingers curled around the stone where it ended. She moved a few more feet in until the bushes became too dense to push through.
The wall had given way to metal fencing that was waist high, which prevented her from stepping forward or even trying to push through the dense tree border on the other side of the fence.
Damn it, there was no way to see anything.
