A Cry in the Night (35 page)

There was a light still on inside Bud’s house. Sam wondered if Sarah had been awake all night, just as he had. He saw a silhouette pass a window for a moment, but nothing more. It didn’t matter, he could wait for ever. His toes were numb, but he stayed put, watching the house from the safety of a small copse. Eventually the sun broke above the fells, and the snow made everything brilliant and dazzling. Sam heard a slow drip as water fell from branches, and where it landed he noticed small pools of green appear. Colour was battling back against the monochrome. Slowly the sun climbed higher and the sky was lit into a beautiful powder-blue.

Sarah had confessed that Lily was alive. She knew this. But there was no way that she could have had any contact with her since she disappeared. All eyes had been on her. The only way she could know for sure would be because Helen had told her.

Just as Sam wondered again why Helen had chosen to visit and then to leave so soon after, he saw the front door
open and Sarah Downing step outside. She was wrapped in a thick black coat and wore heavy boots with a chunky woollen hat, pulled down low to obscure her features. She strode away from the house and Sam was able to follow her easily from some distance as she trudged along a footpath, towards the lake. Hers were the only footprints in the snow, and so he was able to let her get some way ahead, just to be sure she wouldn’t see him.

If Helen had Lily, maybe the reason she came back was to return her to Sarah. To finish what they’d started.

The thought made him quicken his pace. Sarah reached the lake, but didn’t even stop to look at it. Instead she marched on, past the spot where Arthur’s bike was found, heading into the wood. The same woods where she’d disappeared before and returned covered in blood, grass and mud.

Blood. Sam’s throat was dry. He followed her deeper into the woods, and thought about the bonfire and the kids and the drugs and the dealers, but all he could imagine was a poor little girl waiting alone among the trees for her mother to come and kill her.

It was easier among the trees to follow her more closely. They walked on for some time until Sarah stopped and sat on a fallen log. Sam watched her carefully as she reached into the pocket of her coat and pulled out a packet of pills. And then another. She placed them delicately by her side and then her head fell. It took Sam a moment to realise that
she was crying. She reached into her pocket and pulled out two more pill bottles, and then a bottle of vodka. She laid them all in a line on the log next to her and continued to weep.

The noise of melting snow, dripping from the trees’ branches, made it feel as though it was raining. But the sun poured down and the lonely woman cried her heart out, alone in the wood. Sam saw her rip the top off the bottle and take a long, deep swig. But when she reached for the first bottle of pills, he could watch no longer.

His appearance startled her, but once she realised who it was, she just drank again, her eyes never leaving him as she glugged the booze down. He walked over to her and she gripped the bottle like a club.

‘You going to go for me again?’ she asked.

He shook his head, no. ‘What is this?’

‘What do you care?’

She reached for the pills again, but he kicked them off the log. ‘Do you really think I’d let you kill yourself in front of me? You think I’d let you escape that easily?’

A smile pushed its way through the tears. A bitter laugh.

‘You told me, Sarah. Last night, you told me what you did.’

She shook her head, laughing at the empty weight of his words.

‘You said it,’ he repeated. ‘I heard you say it.’

Again, she shook her head. She didn’t know where her
daughter was, she hadn’t killed her son. She had just said yes to a violent man when alone in a room with him. What had he expected?

‘So where were you then?’

Stoned in the forest, she told him. Hiding away from this shitty little place with its snooty women and lairy men. She was brought up in a world where you would shout what you thought, face-to-face, and everything was done up front. Her brother Jed had laughed at her, reminding her that as tough and vicious as their childhood was, it was nothing compared with the cold, hurtful barbs that came with money and manners.

She had tried to be maternal, but it didn’t come naturally, and she envied the way other women would play with children so easily. She yearned for the company of adults and found her children’s needs suffocating. One day she’d pushed Arthur angrily in the road and someone had seen. From that moment on, everything had taken a terrible lurch downhill.

‘I love my children,’ she said mournfully.

She loved her children, but often she didn’t like them. She hated the constant demands and incessant drain on her time. She wanted to be like the mums in the adverts, but it was a world she couldn’t reach, a performance she couldn’t master.

‘Everyone does it behind closed doors, I bet.’

But no one could forgive her. She wasn’t a proper mother. Her clothes were wrong, too short, too tight. She wasn’t a proper woman for a life up here. And the only way to escape was to get drunk or stoned.

‘I would go to the forest and lie on the floor. I could see the sky through the branches and watch the clouds drift by overhead and in the summer it could rain and I’d still be dry. I’d stare up at the clouds and imagine I was up there, far away from here. I fucking hate it.’

When stoned, it would all go away. She’d take more and more, buying pills and other stuff from the local kids. Sometimes, when they couldn’t buy them locally, she and Ashley would drive off to a local town and she’d wait in the car while the girl would trawl the alleys for dealers. But the high never lasted, and each hit worked less and less. Her flights to freedom barely made it over the treetops. And afterwards, the return would feel all the more painful. Each return to Tim’s dull, drab, polite home would make her skin crawl.

‘I didn’t like them. But I loved them. And I never hurt them.’

But they were gone, and so was her husband. And it was time for her to go as well.

‘Turn around and let me go, Sam,’ she said. ‘I’m so tired. Let me go, please.’

Ever since she was a little girl, no one had thought much
of Sarah. She was a pretty girl but always sneering, and no one realised that she was merely reflecting the scorn that she saw in their expressions.

‘Oh Arthur,’ she sobbed. ‘My gorgeous little boy, what did they do to you?’

A bird flapped its wings as it landed on a branch, causing a small avalanche of snow to crash to the ground beside them. Sarah saw none of it, her body rocking with grief, contorted with loss.

She came here to repeat the act, to lose her mind to drugs and let the cold steal her body. She had tried to live with the loss, but it had overwhelmed her.

‘Everyone said I was a shit mum. I guess I thought they were right. But if I’m so bad, then why does this hurt so much? Why can’t I stop crying?’

Her hand pulled again at the pills, but Sam held her back. She had confessed, he’d heard the words. This was a lie. But then she told him how happily Arthur would sit in her lap as they munched on Kendal mint cake at the foot of the fells, how Lily’s face would light up when Sarah let her paint her face with make-up, and of the terrible, clawing ache that woke her every morning, and her grief poured into him.

‘Where’s my little girl?’ she cried. ‘Where is she?’

When Andrea died, the grief had licked at him, over and over like the tide. It had caused him to rage and fight, to
drink and punch and kick at anyone and everyone. It had made him a stranger to those who loved him most. And it had wounded and winded him, slowly dragging him down, making it hard to stand, to fight, to care. And here was Sarah, just the same.

‘She’s dead, isn’t she?’ Sarah said. ‘I think they’re both gone and it’s all too late. And I just want to go too. Let me go, please, Sam. Let me go too.’

No, not just the same. Because he had helped drag Sarah down here. It wasn’t grief and loss alone that had sucked her to the bottom, it was him as well. And the sad, broken look she gave him and the pleas for him to leave her to her fate only confirmed this.

He scooped her up in his arms. She fought him for a while, but gave up the struggle as he marched back through the wood. He didn’t look at her, he couldn’t.

Bud was standing by the door, having seen them approach, and he let Sam enter and settle her on the sofa. Sam told him what had happened, fudging the facts a little to explain his presence. He made Bud swear that he wouldn’t let her out of his sight.

Jed had disappeared and Bud didn’t know where he’d gone, but this wasn’t important. Sam walked away, making empty promises before he left about finding Lily no matter what. She wasn’t dead, he insisted. She wasn’t dead and he would find her. He felt the urgency and believed in his
mission, but he knew that he was walking without direction. The case was crumbling around him.

But if not Sarah, then who?

Much of the snow had turned to slush now. He passed a forlorn snowman who had tipped over, crippled by the thaw.

Helen will have taken her. But not alone.

*

Sam’s head spun with Sarah’s grief, and he felt the same sickening impotence he’d felt at his own loss. He couldn’t let this happen again. For a split second, he imagined a scenario where Lily was never found, but the idea was too terrible and he shoved it away.

Helen was the ringleader. She was the source. If not Sarah, then who could she have used to help her?

His phone buzzed again in his pocket. He saw the message: ‘
wrud? Ax
’. It made no sense, but then another appeared: ‘
wrud = what are you doing! Old man! xxx
’.

Ashley. Since he’d been here, she hadn’t let him out of her sight. He remembered that she was the one who had pushed him towards Sarah in the first place. He thought about the shock on her face when he’d seen her talking to Helen and of the way she’d sought him out at the lake that first night. It was as though she’d stalked him. And even though she’d told him she didn’t know what the woman with the purple coat looked like, or who the dealers in the woods were, because she never scored herself, Sarah had just blown her
lies wide open. Ashley had bought drugs. Ashley had lied. He couldn’t trust a single word she said.

He stabbed a message back on the phone: ‘
Down by the lake. Come now
.’ Then he turned the phone off and looked out over the water.

It made sense that it was her.

‘Hi, Sam.’

He heard the voice behind him, sooner than expected, and turned with his face pulled to the appropriate expression. But it wasn’t Ashley and he was startled by the surprise.

It was Zoe.

Zoe had been searching for Sam all morning. With stories of ‘essential police business’, she’d managed to persuade the owners of the half-sunk boat (a polite, taciturn couple who ran the only convenience store on that side of the water) to let her take it across the lake, and promised to return it as soon as she could. They had helped to right the vessel, attached its outboard motor with many frowns and head shakes, and warned her to be careful out in the middle. The phrase ‘seaworthy’ was bandied about and made her want to laugh, but her need to get back to the village and her worries about Sam held her back. Thanking them and gratefully receiving a thermos of coffee (they had a small camping gas stove), she steered the boat out into the water.

There was a time, as the boat chugged forward, when the mist fully enveloped her and she could see neither end of the lake. She was all alone and it was a wonderful feeling. But it could not last, and as she saw the shore approach,
so her shoulders naturally hunched in anticipation of what was to come.

Sam wasn’t in his room. Bernie mentioned that he’d slipped off early. Zoe took her aside, engaging her as an ally, whether she wanted to be or not. How had her boss seemed? Bernie told her breathily about the march on Bud’s house and the news that Sam had stopped it all. Zoe’s heart leapt at the news, but something about Bernie’s tone told her that Sam wasn’t quite as heroic as the story made out.

Wondering what this meant, she went to Tim’s house and found him cowering behind the front door. When Tim saw who it was, his confidence returned and he squawked angrily at the break-in.

‘This sort of thing doesn’t happen here,’ he said. ‘We all know each other – there’s no way.’ But then he realised that this had happened before, and worse. His children were the awful proof. Instead, therefore, he complained angrily about how useless Zoe and her colleagues were – nationwide. Zoe took in the damage and wondered about the timing. Tim looked ragged, as though he was coming apart, and she made a hasty retreat.

Walking along the road, she inevitably saw David. He was shovelling snow off the small drive of his house and he glared at her as she approached, holding the spade tight in his hand. Like Tim, there was a wildness in the way that he stared at her. She had heard that he was one of
the ringleaders and it felt as though he was still searching for a suitable ending. She was happy to get away from him.

Lastly, she visited Bud and found Sarah stretched out on the sofa, her eyes fixed to the window, red and unseeing. Bud told her how Sam had saved her, and once again she felt a flush of pride and relief, but then he told her that Jed had found him in the house alone with Sarah the night before and her heart plunged again. She was surprised to hear about Jed being there. He was gone now – it was his way, apparently, to come and go as he fancied.

Everything felt as though it was breaking apart. She went back to the lake because she could think of nowhere else to find him. The sun was high now and big patches of open fields revealed themselves from under the snow. She turned down the path and saw how the lake sparkled in the light, and how different it looked from earlier that morning. And there, staring out at it, his back to her, was Sam. She was so pleased that she almost ran up to him before he turned and the mistrust in his eyes stopped her dead.

‘I didn’t expect you back,’ he said.