The two girls skipped down the narrow side street, hand in hand. The council houses all looked the same around here, boxy and grey. Only the doors were painted different colours.
‘B. O. R. I. N. G,’ they chanted in time with each springing step.
The afternoon sun warmed the backs of their necks and arms as their feet scuffed satisfyingly against the cracked grey asphalt, scattering gravel off the kerb and into the gutter.
When they neared the house at the end, they slowed down and walked the last few yards, looking around them furtively.
They had to be careful, because people were nosy. Everyone knew other people’s business in the small, sleepy village, and the girls didn’t want to get into trouble for straying this far from their grandparents’ home.
Luckily, it was just after lunchtime and they were on a side street with hardly any cars around. Most of the adults who lived here were at work, with only the older people and young mums with babies at home during the day.
It was quiet here on Conmore Road, although the girls had spotted one or two people pottering around in their back gardens with watering cans, or dozing in their front rooms in comfy chairs.
Nobody appeared to have noticed the children, both barely taller than the fences and hedges that edged the small front gardens.
One held open the peeling wooden gate, whilst the other girl slipped through, stepping on to the short weed-strewn path that ran down the side of the dwelling. They’d been to this particular house a few times before and knew better than to try and gain access at the front door.
The old woman often forgot to lock up at the back of the house. Sometimes, she’d told them, she only realised the back door had been unlocked all night when she came down to make herself a cup of tea in the morning.
Her name was Bessie, and she was much older than the girls’ own grandma, Joan. She liked to tell them stories about her secret work during the war, decoding messages intercepted from the Germans.
The girls hadn’t believed her at first, but then she’d shown them actual photographs of her sitting at a large, very odd-looking machine, her slim fingers poised above the mysterious buttons and levers.
In the pictures, Bessie wore her blonde hair swept back from her forehead, set in neat waves around her smooth, round face. You could see she had make-up on, possibly even red lipstick, although it was difficult to tell from a black-and-white photograph with creases in it.
Truthfully, the girls found it hard to imagine it really was Bessie, seeing her as she was now: that soft, wrinkly face and the twisted fingers that sprouted at odd angles from swollen knuckles.
Still, they enjoyed hearing the stories, and Bessie was good at telling them, always including lots of interesting detail. Yet she was useless at remembering anything else. The last time the girls had called, she must have asked a dozen times if they’d like a malted milk biscuit and a glass of home-made lemonade.
In the end, one of the girls had decided to help herself, but she’d found the biscuit tin devoid of anything save a scattering of stale crumbs, and there was no lemonade in the fridge at all. Only a mouldy bit of cheese and a tub of margarine.
They’d been annoyed, and when they’d raised their voices, a tear had slid down Bessie’s face. She’d said she must have thought she’d bought the stuff in and then forgotten that she hadn’t.
Who did that? It was crazy.
Anyway, they had nothing else to do today, because it was a staff training day at their primary school. Sometimes school sucked, but then it was boring around here without it to fill most of the day.
‘Let’s go and have some fun with Bessie,’ one girl had said to the other, and although the second girl didn’t want to make fun of the old lady, she’d known better than to disagree.
To be fair, when Bessie got confused and thought the two girls were actually women she used to work with, it was quite funny.
As they’d suspected, the back door was unlocked.
They walked boldly into the kitchen without knocking, and wrinkled their noses against the stale odours and the smell of damp.
They found the old lady in her chair, snoozing. She looked thinner than when they’d seen her during the spring bank holiday week a couple of months earlier. On the small lamp table next to her were a few pound coins and a small piece of paper. To pay the milkman, she’d explained to them before.
Pressing her finger to her mouth, the girl with the ponytail tiptoed up to the chair and bent forward so her mouth was right next to Bessie’s ear.
‘WAAKE UUUP!’ she yelled.
She shouted so loudly, the other girl jumped back from the doorway in alarm.
Bessie let out a strangled yelp and lurched forward, tipping right out of her chair. The girl with the ponytail howled with laughter, bent over double, her eyes shining with mirth.
‘Oh! Oh no… please, help me…’ Bessie pleaded, rocking slightly on her back like a dazed swatted fly.
The girl snatched at Bessie’s arm and roughly tugged at the pretty ruby and gold ring on her right hand before slipping it into the pocket of her shorts. Bessie had once told them it had belonged to her mother, but it was too nice to be stuck on the finger of an old lady who never went out.
‘I need the bathroom,’ said the girl at the door, and hastily walked away. She wanted to leave now; it had all got out of hand and this wasn’t what she called fun. But her cousin seemed to be enjoying it. She would try and think of an excuse why they should go home.
When she got back from the bathroom, she gasped when she saw the blood seeping steadily from the side of Bessie’s head. It pooled neatly on the worn, patterned carpet and sank into the grooves around the corner of the cream tiled fire surround.
‘What happened?’ She swallowed down a knot of panic.
‘It… it was an accident,’ her cousin stammered.
The girls backed out of the room and had just stepped into the kitchen when they heard it… a scuffling sound, like the movement of feet.
They froze as a shadow loomed in the hallway and advanced towards them.
Had Bessie jumped up and started coming after them covered in blood looking like a zombie from a horror film?
Alarmed, they let themselves out of the kitchen and darted around the side of the house until they were out in the front garden again.
Behind them, through the open window, they felt sure they heard Bessie laughing.
They were halfway up the street, heading back home, when they heard the sirens.
I offload the last armful of red and blue toddler painting smocks and push the empty delivery box away with my foot, sinking down on a nearby chair.
‘I thought we’d never get to the end of that lot.’ I stick out my bottom lip and blow air up onto my face, damp wisps of hair flying off my forehead, as I think about the mountain of other stuff I have to get through today: I offered to pick up Mum’s prescription from an out-of-town pharmacy, and then I have to wash Josh’s football kit for his away match the day after tomorrow.
‘You know, we could take somebody on part time to help with stuff like unpacking.’ Chloe, my sister, cuts into my thoughts. ‘Our time could be spent far more productively and you might not complain about being exhausted the whole time.’
Compassion isn’t one of my sister’s strong points. Now I regret telling her in a moment of weakness that the doctor has put me back on my medication. Just until I can feel I’m back in control of everything, feel less overwhelmed.
‘Maybe we can look at taking on help in another year or so.’ My best friend Beth is the obvious choice for the job, but I refrain from voicing that, as she and Chloe can’t stand each other. ‘Are you coping with the admin?’
Chloe isn’t just an employee, she’s also a director of my business, InsideOut4Kids, so she’ll hate me for checking up on her, but this stuff is important.
Top of her to-do list is our insurance renewal, and some quarterly expenses paperwork the accountant asked for over a week ago now. As the main shareholder, I make it my business to keep a discreet eye on what needs doing.
Every time I ask her if she’s OK, I simply get a stock ‘yes thanks’ in reply, so I’m reluctant to ask. But Chloe has always been one to take the path of least resistance, even when we were children. She’d always rather Mum buy a cake than help her bake one. So I feel I have to keep tabs on the stuff she’s doing, because it could make or break the company.
‘I’m on top of my responsibilities, thanks for asking,’ she retorts. ‘The fact remains that we spend a lot of time sweating the small stuff that someone else could easily take on.’
I try to appeal to her logical side.
‘Like Beth says, for now we need to plough any spare cash back into the business. I can’t afford to do anything to jeopardise this order now I’ve put the house up as collateral. We talked about all this, remember?’
Chloe folds her arms and shoots me a belligerent look.
‘Yes, Mother, I do remember,’ she snipes back. ‘But let’s at least make decisions off our own bat. The business actually has sod-all to do with Beth bloody Chambers.’
I should have known better than to mention Beth again, but her knowledge and advice have been invaluable to me as I try and build the business. In fact, if Beth hadn’t encouraged me to go for it, to take a chance, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to start up in the first place.
We began eighteen months ago from my spare bedroom, getting our trademark kids’ clothes made by local home workers and selling them on eBay.
Now we have a sophisticated website complete with shopping cart function and we sell clothing wholesale to independent shops up and down the country. Six months ago, we moved out of my box room and rented a local industrial unit.
We have big plans to expand by selling to Europe in the next twelve months, and there’s still a sense of celebration in the air after we recently won a very lucrative contract for major Dutch wholesaler Van Dyke.
Pretty rapid by anyone’s standards, though still not quick enough for Chloe, judging by her comments today.
But she’s not the one who has remortgaged her house to fund the merchandise to satisfy this big new order.
‘Sir Alan Sugar never got anywhere in business by being cautious.’ Chloe’s a big fan of The Apprentice. ‘We need to talk about these issues seriously, Juliet. If we moved production to Bangladesh or India, we’d double our profits overnight.’
Her phone rings and she glances down at it on the floor between us. The screen lights up with the words ‘No Caller ID’ and she ignores it.
‘Remember what we said when we started out?’ I sigh. ‘Fairly paid work for local people, and we get vibrant, happy clothes made with care. Not a load of tat churned out by some poor soul trapped in an unregulated sweatshop.’
We’d had to go abroad for the Van Dyke merchandise but we still chose to go ethical over the cheaper sweatshop options.
Chloe rolls her eyes and picks up her phone, the screen still lit up from a text notification. She dabs a fingertip on it and reads the message.
I try and read her expression and wonder idly if she’s seeing someone again. There’s been nobody really special since Jason walked out on her and my niece, Brianna, five years ago, but she does use online dating sites in fits and starts and occasionally tells me about her dates.
But Chloe’s face remains deadpan as she presses a button so her phone screen turns black again. She seems oddly distracted, still staring down at it when there’s nothing to see.
‘Do you want to have a proper conversation?’ I suggest.
‘About what?’ Her fingers begin to drum on her thigh as if she’s thinking about something else entirely.
She’s dressed in old jeans, which she’s paired with a faded blue T-shirt and a cropped cream cardigan. Her reddish-brown hair is pulled back into a smooth ponytail and she looks effortlessly groomed in a sort of laid-back way.
She is all sharp angles now, but for the wrong reasons. Her perfect nose, cheekbones and jawline used to match her toned body, with its wide shoulders, narrow hips and slim legs. But that was before she lost so much weight. Now her head looks a bit too large, out of proportion with the rest of her. There’s her bony clavicle, the protruding tendons in her neck and the once perfectly fitting skinny jeans that now bag a little around her bum and thighs.
In contrast, I am shorter and rounder, my features less distinctive. I do make the effort to tame my dark corkscrew curls before I leave the house each morning, usually by twisting my hair up in a messy bun, but bits of it constantly make a bid for freedom throughout the day.
Our daughters are similarly different physically too.
‘Chloe, do you want to talk about the reason why you can’t seem to focus on anything I’m saying?’
She hesitates and glances at me, and I think for just a moment that she’s actually going to open up to me, but then her eyes glaze over again.
‘Maybe, just not now.’ She blinks and picks up her phone again, scrolling unenthusiastically through her Facebook feed. ‘But you’re not the only one who gets to make decisions around here. Remember that.’
I sigh, stand up and brush bits of red cotton from my jeans.
‘I’ll add the new stock to the system in the back office while it’s fresh in my mind,’ I say, picking up the mood.
‘Put the kettle on while you’re in there, will you?’ Chloe calls just as her phone rings again.
I pop into the tiny kitchenette and wash the packing dust from my hands, drying them on the small hand towel. Then I reach into my handbag on the counter and pull out my phone.
Three missed calls, and they’re all logged as having no caller ID. Immediately I think of my ten-year-old daughter, Maddy. I hope there hasn’t been a problem at school and it’s the office trying to get in touch with me. I can’t think of anyone else whose number isn’t in my phone who would be so desperate to speak to me.
My eight-year-old son, Josh, is away on an overnight school trip to Hathersage in Derbyshire. But I know everything is OK with him, as the teacher sent a group text to parents after breakfast confirming they’d had a good night at the youth hostel. They were heading to an adventure survival centre before returning to the school for pick-up this afternoon.
Josh will be beside himself with excitement when Tom collects him later. He’ll be bubbling over with exaggerated stories of how brave he was in the forest survival tasks.
We have no worries about Josh, but Maddy… well, she’s a different story.
Her behaviour has been somewhat challenging at home lately. She seems to suddenly have a smart answer to everything, whether it’s a request to tidy her bedroom or a suggestion that she get her homework done before tea.
On top of that, she’s not been sleeping well for the last few weeks. I’ve been meaning to take her to the doctor, just for a general chat and check-up, although I wasn’t too concerned until the other night, when I heard her moving around in her bedroom past midnight. When I got up to see if she was OK, I found her bed empty. She was sitting downstairs in the living room, in the dark.
‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’ I sat on the arm of the chair and stroked her hair.
Usually she’d lean into me, talk about what might be bothering her, but not this time.
‘Nothing’s wrong, Mum,’ she told me in an irritated tone. ‘I just can’t sleep, that’s all.’
Tom didn’t think there was anything in it when we had a quick chat about it in the morning, but it was the main reason we agreed to spend some quality time together as a family this summer.
Now we’ve landed the big contract with Van Dyke’s, I can’t really take a full week off for a holiday abroad, as Tom initially suggested. But we’ve agreed to organise more days out to National Trust attractions, and we’re going to try and book a long weekend at the coast at the end of August.
Tom has been really busy in his new job, too, working extra hours voluntarily to get up to speed with the infrastructure at the vast distribution centre where he’s trying to make his mark.
Between his new career and my business, it hasn’t left a lot of time for us as a family or a couple. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d had a night out, just the two of us.
I stare at my phone screen again, at the missed calls that could be from school. But then that theory implodes as I remember with a jolt that Maddy’s not even at school, because they’re having yet another of those blasted staff training days.
I dropped her off at Mum’s this morning to spend the day with her cousin, Chloe’s daughter Brianna. It’s a measure of where my head is at the moment, that it slipped my mind at all.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
Someone is hammering on the side door of the unit that we always keep locked.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
They knock harder still.
‘Police! Open up,’ a deep male voice yells.
I rush out of the kitchenette to find Chloe already standing by the door, her hand pressed up against her throat. Our eyes meet, and in that single glance, the shadow of a thousand terrible scenarios flashes between us.
BANG, BANG, BANG.
The noise is deafening, urgent. It infuses my entire body with a primal sense of terror that sets every nerve ending on edge.
‘OK, OK, I’m coming,’ I call, rushing over to the door. My hands shake as I fiddle clumsily with the latch. When the door flies open, I stagger back.
There are two uniformed officers there, both male and wearing grim expressions.
‘Mrs Juliet Fletcher?’
I nod, and they look at Chloe questioningly.
‘Chloe Voce,’ she offers faintly.
‘We need you both to come with us to the station,’ the taller one says, looking around the interior of the unit. ‘I take it you have the means to secure this place?’
‘Yes, but… what is it?’ I say. ‘What’s happened?’
‘There’s been a serious incident and we need you both to come with us right away.’ The other officer sounds as if he’s been rehearsing the line.
‘Why both of us?’ Chloe says, and I can hear the fear crackling through her words like a burning wire. ‘Is it our parents? Has something happened to Mum or Dad?’
‘Is it our girls?’ I say, my voice faltering.
‘It’s your daughters, ma’am,’ the taller officer confirms. ‘There’s been a serious incident and we need you to come with us to the station.’
‘Oh God!’
Chloe gasps and I press my back against the wall. An unwanted vision of Maddy running into the road, chasing a ball into the path of a racing vehicle, clouds my mind.
‘Are they… are the girls OK? Has there been a car accident?’ I don’t want to hear the answer, but I have to know.
‘It’s not a car accident,’ the shorter officer confirms.
‘So nobody’s hurt?’ Chloe blows out air. ‘Thank God for that.’
‘Your daughters aren’t injured, but as I’ve already said, there has been a serious incident. Rest assured you’ll be told everything when you get to the station.’ He coughs. ‘I’m afraid we can’t answer any more questions at this point in time.’
The officers glance at each other, and I feel a blistering heat settle over my chest. It creeps up into my neck and face and scorches my flesh from the inside.
Whatever has happened, it’s bad. I can feel the weight of it bearing down on us. Police officers aren’t usually this brusque or evasive. Especially where kids are concerned.
Chloe grips my forearm as I reach wordlessly for the key hanging on the wall hook. She’s blinking back tears of the same raw panic and dread that are currently forming a huge knot in the pit of my stomach.
But I can’t say anything to make her feel better, because as I grab my handbag, pull the door closed and check that it’s locked, I somehow instinctively know, deep in my bones, that once we leave the lock-up unit and go with them, things will never be the same again.
The interior of the police car is stifling, and the pungent odour of hot plastic from the equipment-crowded dashboard irritates my throat as I try to take calming breaths.
The driver opens the two front windows slightly before driving out of the industrial park. Our lock-up unit is so close to home, I walk there and back every day. It takes me no more than fifteen minutes each way.
My throat and mouth feel bone dry and my head is thrumming with a thousand possibilities, none of which make any sense. It’s hard to reconcile what the officers are saying: that the girls aren’t hurt but they’ve both been involved in a serious incident.
Relief and panic squashed together in one sentence.
I text Tom rather than call him. It’s a big day for him, and I’m hoping this problem with Maddy can be resolved quickly.
On way to police station… Maddy ok but involved in some kind of incident. Will call when I know more but come if you can x
The car passes the familiar streets my sister and I used to play on during our own childhood. We move smoothly past the village library, staffed mainly by volunteers and open only three days a week, where I’d go to research my homework. Further down the road, the primar. . .
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