The Silent Ones (2 page)

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.

T
hey 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.

After the improvised service, Mum and Dad said they were going to Melanie’s sister’s and Darren encouraged them to go – he was desperate to smoke a joint and float away from his cares for a while.

Once they’d left he took the stairs two at a time and lay on his bed and let the marijuana pull him away from his worries. Wandering out of his bedroom again and past his parents’, he noticed the cardboard box half pulled out from under the bed. It was the box about his sister’s abduction. Inside were press cuttings, magazine articles, police reports, victim support letters, sympathy cards from the public. The box should have been put away in the attic, Darren thought, but Mum had kept it here, right under her head. She had slept surrounded by it all for the last ten years.

Dad was right, it was infecting her, radiating its bad karma, probably causing the cells to mutate in her breast with the grief. It was no accident that those cells lay over her heart, Darren thought, feeling stoned now. He sat down cross-legged by the box and began looking through it. He found pictures of his mum looking shockingly young, his dad standing next to her, photos of all five women and girls and the one photo of Olivia Duvall, used over and over again. She was very ugly, with one side of her face enlarged and one eye half closed. She had short, dark hair. She fitted perfectly the image of the ‘freak of nature’ killer that the press and the public wanted her to be.

He found the police reports into the case. He started to read them again, but began to feel ill and put the paper down.

Olivia was tried for all five murders together. The trial was controversial; none of the bodies had been found, but there were scraps of physical evidence at her house: a tiny torn section of a pair of Isla’s pants in the cellar, a hairband belonging to another girl, trapped behind a radiator, two strands of dark hair clinging to the elastic, the blood and the bone fragments in the garden …