The Silent Ones

by Ali Knight

Genres: Thrillers

Synopsis

He'll do whatever it takes to find his missing sister.

Darren Evans was only eleven when his beloved sister Carly and four other teenage girls disappeared, sparking a huge police investigation.

Eventually, a woman confessed to their murders. But although she admitted her guilt, Olivia Duvall refused to say what had happened to those five missing girls. Or where their bodies might lie.

Ten years later, Darren's family are still no closer to the truth. Desperate to alleviate his parents' heartbreak, Darren gets a job as a cleaner in the psychiatric hospital where Olivia was committed, hoping he can make her tell him his sister's fate once and for all.

But playing a killer is a very dangerous game . . .

Release date: June 18, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 336

Sample

There were two guards in front of Olivia and her lawyer behind her, the sound of their hard civilian shoes clattering on the wipe-clean floor tiles. She swung her hands easily by her sides; there were no handcuffs, though she was sure this mother would expect them. They’d probably put them on her outside the door, just for show, to keep the mother calm, to stop her thinking she was having it easy in a high-security hospital rather than a prison. Mothers dispensed their moral outrage so cheaply.

Their little convoy paused outside a door as a guard fumbled for the right key. It amazed Olivia how clumsy people were. She suspected it was a reflection of their brains. She was the calmest here – none of them wanted this meeting to happen; one thing she’d learned over the years was that the prison system loved the status quo. Deviating from it upset everyone.

They entered the windowless room and she was made to sit on a chair fixed to the floor. Her lawyer took a seat next to her. A long blacked-out window on the wall to her right would have the hangers-on peering through; there was probably a crowd. Maybe she’d give them a show.

‘Upset her and your privileges will be withdrawn,’ said one of the guards who had walked down the corridor with her. Olivia didn’t bother to nod. ‘We’re ready,’ he said to no one in particular.

The door opposite her opened and a large black lawyer came in, followed by a small woman with a set mouth and dark hair. Her eyes met Olivia’s and the woman faltered in the doorway. Olivia noted with detachment that she had stopped breathing. Olivia smiled, spread her unchained hands wide, palms up. ‘Come on in, I won’t bite.’

The men in the room stiffened; the woman’s mouth gaped and then closed. Olivia turned to the window, already enjoying herself. The woman’s lawyer indicated that she should take a seat and sat down after her.

The mother was shrunken and shrivelled and old before her time, thin in the cheeks with tight lines migrating from upper lip to below her nose. She had her hands on the table. She shifted in her chair and looked straight at Olivia. ‘I’m Carly Evans’s mother. I wanted to ask you one last time to tell me where Carly is. So she can come back to us.’

She said it with pride. She was defiant. That got you nowhere, Olivia knew.

‘You talk about her as if she’s still alive.’

The black lawyer’s eyes bulged, the guard’s mouth dropped open a fraction, but the mother didn’t move.

‘I believe she is.’

Olivia grinned. ‘And what do I get for revealing this precious titbit?’

The lawyer found his voice. ‘You would get extra privileges, more time to attend courses, longer periods outside.’ He looked like he would rather be anywhere but here.

‘I have always felt myself a spiritual person,’ Mrs Evans said, and Olivia lost interest immediately and drifted off for a few seconds. Her own lawyer had grown old since she’d last seen him a few years ago; he’d lost his hair and presumably his wife too – she noted that the wedding band was gone.

‘Are you listening?’ the mother said, as if the bereaved should be offered special treatment. ‘I’ve got cancer, and I’m dying. I’m here today because I believe that despite what you’ve done, in your heart, you have feelings and you feel remorse.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because you’re a woman.’

Olivia’s grin was replaced by a flush of anger. She was being underestimated and that made her mad. She had been fighting against lazy stereotypes of female intuition and womanly feeling all her life, and this mother was revelling in them. The assumption that made her maddest was that to do what she had done she had to have been influenced by a man. In love or infatuated; that she was incapable of killing them by herself. That she needed the cruelty and strength of a man to kill a child.

She sat back slowly in her chair. ‘That I’m a woman seems to be important to you. I’ll tell you what’s important. I haven’t seen a bus for ten years. A river. I haven’t heard the sound of wind in the trees, feet kicking a stone, the crackle of a fire. And I never will again. I stare at these walls for fourteen hours a day. Yet I am freer than you will ever be. I lie in the gutter, but I am looking at the stars.’

Mrs Evans frowned. ‘I have it in my heart to forgive. Please, tell me where my daughter is.’

Olivia grinned. This was priceless! They might as well be in Scandinavia for all the liberal tosh that was being thrown around. She had often wondered whether it wouldn’t have been better to have been born in Texas. They would have shoved the lethal stuff in her veins a decade ago. It would have spared her the mewling. ‘Mrs Evans, you’re going to have to try a lot, lot harder than that.’

She saw the tears brim in the mother’s eyes. ‘Please, God, I beg you.’ Olivia felt the pleasure of power flush through her body. It felt as pure and sharp as freedom. ‘Make it end, for me and the other families. We have weapons we can use to—’

Olivia laughed. ‘Do you know the most powerful weapon in the world, Mrs Evans? This.’ She stuck out her tongue and wiggled it. ‘A woman’s weapon, isn’t it? I bet your husband’s thought that over the years, your lawyer too. A tongue-lashing from a woman is a terrible thing. They say words can’t hurt you, but we know that’s not true. They hurt more than the sharpest tools, they can cast you into a pit of despair, or deliver you to ecstasy.’

‘Just tell me and put me out of this misery!’ The mother’s voice had risen to a wail.

‘That’s enough.’ The woman’s lawyer stood up sharply, his chair scraping back noisily on the floor. ‘This is achieving nothing. It’s time to go.’

Mrs Evans didn’t move, staring at Olivia helplessly. She needed the strong arm of her lawyer to get her out of the seat and out of the door.

Olivia liked having power. There was power in holding a secret, and she was going to keep it.

I was always intrigued when a real bobby-dazzler walked into my office and asked for my help. It proved yet again that no one is immune from betrayal – no matter how rich, famous or physically blessed, every walk of life needed my services: a husband watcher. I was a snooper, a sex detective, a marriage doctor, a destroyer of dreams, a killer of happy-ever-afters. I had spent my career down amongst the grubby pain of love betrayed, of lies exposed. Beauty wouldn’t save you, money couldn’t insulate you from it. The woman in the doorway proved just that. She smelled rich and she was a babe.

‘Don’t be shy, come on in,’ I said. I was in a good mood, joshing and joking with Simona, the studious young Italian who worked for me.

The woman in the doorway was blonde, casually dressed, hard to put an age to but somewhere just north of forty, and scared as hell.

She stepped uncertainly into the room and Simona jumped up and closed the door behind her. ‘Please, take a seat,’ she said, holding out her hand towards the sofa.

The woman declined our offer of coffee or tea so Simona gave her a glass of water.

The woman perched on the edge of a small sofa near the window, her ankles and knees clamped together in a pose that the royals used to guarantee no knicker shots. Her blue eyes roamed over the three desks in the room, mine, Simona’s and Rory’s, over my retro filing cabinet and the pot plants and the black fan that only gets used on the three hottest days of the year. I couldn’t tell if she was impressed by my stripped wood floors or my linen blinds, but I was. I loved my office and I loved my job. ‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

There was silence for a moment. The woman looked at her hands helplessly, twiddled with her wedding ring and gripped her bag. ‘God, this is so embarrassing.’ She tailed off, her voice was quiet. She conjured up English country gardens and mellow stone walls, scones and cricket matches and all that Olde English stuff.

Simona gave me a conspiratorial look and made herself scarce by heading into the small kitchen off the main room to make fresh coffee and pull out some little Italian cakes that always oiled the wheels when a client came in. ‘OK, let’s start at the beginning,’ I said. ‘I’m Maggie Malone, I run the Blue and White agency, and I’m going to find out if he’s cheating on you. I’ll tell you who he’s cheating with, where and how, I’ll show you the video, pictures or audio evidence if you want to see or hear it. And you’ll pay me.’ I smiled. Her mouth fell open, but only for a moment. ‘And then you get to skip all the bits where he claims it was a misunderstanding and he’s innocent and all that. It saves you a lot of time.’

I usually got one of three reactions at this point: tears, anger, or an empty seat and a banging door. Very rarely I got a fourth: she sat bolt still for about three seconds and then she burst out laughing. It was the first cocktail of the evening, that smile. She put her bag on the floor and sat back, twirling a shapely ankle that poked beneath her trousers. She ran her hands down her shiny hair, clasped them in front of her over her knees. Her beauty came out when she relaxed. ‘I think you and I are going to get on very well.’

I’d always been Marmite, people either loved me or hated me. This lady was a snob and I was a yob, and often opposites attract. Some people disliked what I do, they found it grubby and underhand, but I say, wouldn’t you want to know if he was cheating? Wouldn’t you open that envelope, click on that video file? Of course you would and anyone who says otherwise is a hypocrite.

I stood up and came over and we shook hands.

‘I’m Helene Moreau,’ she said.

Of course she had a name like that. Exotic, classy, I guessed the husband was French. There was no ‘which Helene?’ for her. She was one of a kind.

‘And how can I help you, Helene?’

Simona arrived back in the room with fresh coffee in a cup and a cake plate decorated with flowers, on which sat the Italian biscuits. This time she took both without hesitation. She sighed. ‘I want you to tell me if I’m married to a cheating bastard.’

Darren stood in the living room doorway, trying to block out his mother’s voice from behind him in the hallway. ‘Take him for a walk, otherwise he’ll bark all night and the neighbours have suffered enough. Darren!’

‘In a minute, Mum.’ Dad was watching golf in what must have been America, the course so green it was blinding, the sky Georgia blue. He’d seen a paint colour on a chart called that once, and had used it in a painting a few months ago. He didn’t understand golf and couldn’t see the attraction. He could never see the ball when they teed off, the camera swinging wildly to capture nothing except that Georgia blue. He began counting the beer cans on the table in front of Dad. Too many for this time of day.

‘Darren, the dog.’

There was a ripple of applause onscreen from a lot of square, middle-aged men in baseball caps and oversized shorts.

‘Darren!’

Her voice was loud enough to force him to begin moving.

‘OK, OK.’ He turned lazily to see Chester staring up at him, tail wagging.

His mum had got the bit between her teeth. ‘I don’t know what’s got into you lately, honestly. You’ve finished that course that cost you a fortune and now you’re frozen. Like now, you’re not even really watching the golf, you’re hovering in the doorway, neither in nor out. Take that dog out and get a life, or at least a job. Paint the house!’ She was waving her hand at the patch of carpet beneath him, where all he could see was Chester and his lolling tongue and a pen lid that had bounced away behind the radiator pipe.

‘OK, OK!’ Darren gave in and grabbed the lead she was holding out. There was irony here, if you cared to look for it. Chester was Carly’s dog; she’d begged Mum and Dad for a puppy and they had joyfully complied. Now, this lazy heap of dog was just another painful reminder that Carly was gone. Darren had just completed a fine art degree at the London Institute, spent three years immersed in trying to not show things as they really seemed – to not represent them literally. And all his mum could do was nag him about painting the house, as if a three-year course and a degree show made him a painter and decorator.

Not for the first time he had the feeling that his parents didn’t appreciate how he had struggled – that the shocks of the past caused him pain too. And everything was named wrongly – his home wasn’t his home, because his home had been Brighton and he had been uprooted from there in the aftermath of his sister’s death; his dog wasn’t really his dog, even though he was the only one who looked after him; Carly was his sister but she had been gone for years – dead but with no body and no grave, a murdered teenager who had become a saint. Life was as confusing as those invisible golf balls, everyone supposedly watching and applauding and seeing nothing.

He opened the front door and slammed it behind him, the front of the house Mum was so keen for him to paint shaking with the impact. The roads to his right were Victorian terraces. To his left they gave way to roomier streets with houses built in the 1930s, cars jostling for space in what at one time would have been front gardens. His own house was in a little row of seventies houses with clapboard fronts, an anomaly more suited to a Kent coastal village. South London was full of dreamers imagining other places, he felt. Now the peeling paint on the clapboard was like another reprimand. He jumped over the crazy paving of the front yard, edges striking skywards like a row of teeth growing awry.

He turned left, up the hill, the boxy skyscrapers of central London just about visible through the pollution haze in the distance. Shit, he had forgotten his keys. Mum would nag him about it when he returned. The day was muggy and close and he had on a T-shirt that was too thick and made him sweat. Chester was waddling, making strange wheezing noises as he grubbed about on the pavement, weaving round the skinny saplings that lined the road.

Despite his protestations, Darren loved this dog. He used to walk him miles over the Downs behind Brighton when they lived on the south coast, desperate to get out of the house and away from his mum’s grief and the spectre of his missing sister. They’d moved to south London a year after Carly’s disappearance, passing the exodus of people moving from London to the coast for a better life and fresher air. He always felt he was going in the opposite direction to other people.

He crossed the street at the top of the rise but Chester didn’t follow, sitting instead by the edge of the road, paws dangling over the gutter. ‘Come on,’ Darren called to him.

Chester didn’t move. Darren crossed the street and bent down, ruffled his ears. ‘Come on, old-timer.’ Chester gave a low whine of pain and got to his feet, turned in a circle, his breath coming in jagged gasps. ‘Chester?’ Darren put his hand out towards him as a violent shudder passed along Chester’s back. Darren fancied the dog looked up at him with despair in his eyes. Another whine escaped, louder and more desperate. Chester’s legs collapsed under him and he stared up at Darren, as if disappointed. Darren managed to say ‘No!’ before the dog’s painful panting stopped and he was still.

Darren crouched down over Chester, shocked. The dog was ten years old. Too young to die, surely? He bent down and picked the dog up in his arms and walked back down the hill to the house. Chester was surprisingly heavy. Darren rang the doorbell with his chin and his mum pulled it open, ready to let loose a stream of invective about the forgotten keys, but instead she stood stupefied as Darren came in, the body of the dog large and awkward in the small hallway.

‘He just keeled over in the street at the top of the hill.’

Mum had her hand over her mouth as Dad came out of the living room. She put a shaking hand on Chester’s head. Darren could see her lip beginning to go, the quiver that always began one of her crying jags.

‘He died right in front of me.’

He could see his mum’s face crumpling like a paper bag and he knew he had to say something to try to make it better. ‘He didn’t suffer, Mum.’ The lies we tell, Darren thought, to make it better. Death was not easy, or quick. ‘He died right away.’

As soon as he’d said it he wished he could take it back. He heard her jagged in-breath and the wail that came after it. ‘Mum, I didn’t mean—’

‘Darren—’ Dad was trying to butt in.

‘I’ve got the body of her dog but I haven’t got her!’

Darren felt his knees give way and he had to slump against the wall.

‘I can stand by the grave of her dog, hold him in my arms now he’s gone, but not my own daughter! She never had me there.’

‘Melanie …’ Andy’s long arms were round his wife’s shoulders now, her wailing coming louder, as if the hallway wasn’t large enough to contain it.

Anger chased after her grief as Chester had chased his tail in earlier years. ‘All I get is a dog! This dog’ll get a better send-off than Carly …’

Darren and his dad looked at each other and tried to swing into action. They had done this before, on the many occasions that had set his mum off. This time Andy dragged her into the kitchen and took some pills off a kitchen shelf, urging her to take one. Darren was still holding Chester’s body, a weight in his arms so heavy he was in danger of developing back spasms.

Melanie was quieter now, her head buried in Andy’s chest. Darren looked around for somewhere to put Chester, and decided on his basket. He suddenly didn’t want to let him go; he felt a terrible fondness towards him, remembered the passage of the years. Tears pricked his eyes as it dawned on him that he had known this dog as long as he had known his own sister.

‘He had you at the end, Darren, Carly just had the Witch,’ Mum sobbed.

‘Melanie please, let’s think about Chester,’ Andy said.

That’s what his mum called Olivia Duvall: the Witch. Her real name was never mentioned. What the Witch did to Carly, what the Witch was watching on telly, how the Witch could sleep – that was how his mum always referred to her.

His mum wiped her face with the heel of her hand and came and knelt next to Darren by the dog basket.

‘Can you shut his eyes?’ she asked. Darren reached across Chester’s nose and got his eyes shut. ‘Do you think it was a heart attack?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘He was walking along like normal and then he sat down by the kerb. He was struggling to breathe. He was moaning and then he slumped over.’ So much detail. He could describe every little step in the sequence; there was no guessing, no filling in the blanks with horrid speculations. Hanging over all of them was the contrast to the great yawning chasm of information about what had happened to Carly.

‘God I’ll miss you, Chester,’ Darren said. They had a quiet moment, the three of them, there on the floor with Chester’s body. Darren put his arm round his mother’s shoulders. Her eyes were red but she wasn’t seeing the dog, he knew she wasn’t. Her eyes showed the fervour of ten years of intense prayers that had never been answered and never would be now. She wanted her daughter back. ‘Mum, we’ll do anything you want. You can decide. How do you want to bury him?’

Melanie suddenly found some strength and stood up tall. ‘I’ll tell you what I want.’ She glared at him and Andy as if they were at fault somehow. ‘I want to stand here in this garden, with my daughter by my side, and I want her to look down on the body of her dog, because she is living and he is dead. I want us to stand here as a family.’

Andy and Darren glanced at each other and then away. Darren felt the impotence settle on him like a wet coat, the torment of the unanswered questions, the feeling that he could have done more, that he should have tried harder to find his sister.

Living back home since his course had finished had made him realise how stuck his mum was – how stuck all of them were. Mum and Dad were stunted by their grief. He needed to grab life by the throat, but he was burdened by a sister whose own life had been cut brutally short. He felt trapped by the weight of his mum’s false dreams, of her deluded hope, and of his dad’s drink habit – he kept finding bottles of spirits secreted in the recycling bin and crushed beer cans hidden under newspapers.

Andy took Melanie to go and lie down. Darren got the shovel from the shed and dug a hole in the corner of the garden by the dead bush no one had bothered to remove last year. His dad came out and stood around pushing at the soil with his boots. Darren watched him. ‘You OK?’

Andy looked back at the house. ‘It’s a good thing you’re here, Darren, things have been tough recently.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself, the breast cancer diagnosis is a big thing to take on board.’

He nodded, distracted, looking back at the house to make sure Melanie wasn’t in a position to hear them. ‘I’m worried, Darren, really worried.’

Alarm spiked up Darren’s back. ‘Is the diagnosis worse than I’ve been told?’

Dad shook his head and struggled for words. ‘No, it’s not that. I’m sorry, Darren, but I’m finding it impossible lately. She hasn’t got over Carly. Her grief hasn’t gone away, it’s worse if anything. I can’t live with it, Darren.’ Darren stopped digging. ‘She needs to accept that Carly is dead. That she’s never coming back.’ Once Dad had started he couldn’t stop. ‘My life is a daily battle to keep her mood up, but what’s that doing to me, Darren? She won’t go and see a professional to work through it. Instead there’s a procession of clairvoyants and Tarot readers and priests and shamans coming to the house and fleecing her of our money, preying on her weakness and vulnerability.’

Dad kicked the mound of mud in frustration. ‘She never asks what I want. I’ll tell you now, Darren, what I want. I want Carly’s bones, so I can end this thing. I want your mum to stare at those bones, so she can accept, grieve and move on. Carly is gone. And she’s never coming back. Because, Darren, if she doesn’t accept it, it’s me who’s going to be gone.

‘And this fiasco with the prison visit, nothing was ever going to come of that. You knew it, so did everyone else. She spent months with lawyers writing endless letters, buoying herself up for meeting the Witch, and she was simply humiliated. I’m forty-eight years old, Darren, there are decades of life still to live, and I want to live them well, even though my beloved daughter is gone. And I owe it to you. You are young, you have your whole life in front of you.’

Darren crouched down by Chester’s grave, by the pile of London clay he’d dug, the hard brown streaks marbled with black topsoil, and said a silent prayer. For years he had prayed that Carly would be found, that she would walk, like a miracle on water, shimmering and bright, back into their lives. Now he prayed for something different. He prayed that he could find Carly’s remains. Banish his dad’s bottles and his mum’s false hope.

Darren studied his mud-encrusted hands, the black curve of dirt under his fingernails. Since he had come back home from college he had been aware of the increasing distance between his parents and his low-level panic was now beginning to feel forceful. It was a double abandonment. Mum had endured a complicated birth with Carly that had forced her to subsequently have a hysterectomy. His parents had always told him that this trauma had been a gift – they had adopted him, loved him and brought him up as their own. They were the only family he had, but now it felt as though it was all falling apart and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

They buried Chester in the garden at sunset, wrapped in his blanket. They cried together as a family, acknowledging that there was another funeral they had never had, for a girl they had lost and who they wanted back so much.. . .