Blood Lines

  But there was something else. Something that travelled the distance between them.

  It was not visible: he could not hear it, touch it or smell it but it was there all the same.

  He could not tear away his gaze as she threw her leg over the bike and kick-started it into life.

  She rolled forward to the bottom of the drive and paused.

  She looked both ways, and his heart almost stopped when her eyes glazed over him.

  For a second he thought their eyes might meet.

  But they didn’t. She looked beyond him as though he didn’t exist. And in some ways he didn’t, and he never had.

  His uncle had first entered his room when he was five years old. It was his first real memory. Everything before had been obliterated by the terror and confusion of that one night. And everything since had been coloured by it.

  He couldn’t remember marking his childhood in the same way as other kids. He didn’t navigate that landscape with peaks of birthday parties or holidays and troughs of football game losses and Christmas disappointments.

  From five years of age his uncle came into his room and raped him. The years after that were a blur.

  Only the abuse was clear. It became everything. Childhood passed in a litany of the first time it happened; the first time he’d cried so hard he’d vomited. The first time he’d considered trying to die somehow. The first time he’d realised that his prayers were not going to be answered. And finally, the first time he’d realised that he could end the torture himself.

  His twelfth birthday marked the change. It marked the moment he knew what he had to do. It was the day he had seen himself in the mirror and realised he no longer had the physical characteristics of the little boy that was still curled up inside him. Almost without him realising he had reached a height of five feet four inches and his skin was filling out.

  The plan had begun to form and was astounding in its simplicity. He could make it stop. He had the power. The consequences did not matter to him. Nothing could be worse. He cherished this new knowledge to himself until the next time came.

  And when it did he was ready.

  He grabbed the kitchen knife from beneath his pillow.

  ‘You’re not going to stab me,’ his uncle mocked him with a smirk.

  And he had known his uncle was right. He dropped the knife beside the bed that had been his prison for seven years. The first punch had landed to the right of the man’s temple and had knocked his uncle sideways.

  He didn’t want the speed of the knife. He wanted to feel every punch and kick. He wanted to feel the man’s death beneath his fingertips because then he would know. He would know for sure it was over.

  Afterwards, he had sat downstairs and waited. His parents returned from the theatre excited and flushed as they walked in the door. The mood surrounding them disappeared when they saw him sitting forward on the sofa, dried blood covering his hands.

  He had explained everything. They had been shocked, horrified, and eventually disbelieving. Even the invasive medical assessments had failed to convince them. They maintained he had been ‘experimenting’ with other boys at school.

  He continued to die inside as he was tried as an adult and sentenced to twelve years in a young offenders’ institute.

  He’d only wanted the abuse to stop but, of course, it hadn’t. He had lost everything and it still didn’t end.

  Until he went to Hardwick House. The only place where he had slept without the fear of the night time terror.

  And then he had met Doctor Thorne. The devil inside his head.

  Of course the detective inspector hadn’t seen him. He was a non-person. He was nothing more than a sum of all the bad things that had happened to him over the years. There was no personality, no likes or dislikes. Only a deep hatred for everything.

  And that included Kim Stone.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  Dawson crossed out another name on the list. Four more to go and he was done. He had politely asked the others to leave an hour ago. He had been thankful for their help but as the clock had continued towards and beyond finishing time his discomfort at their inconvenience had grown exponentially. It was his mistake and it was up to him to fix it.

  He was in no doubt that new leads would continue to come in and they would be as much use as the ones that had already been actioned and dismissed.

  His gaze drifted to The Bowl and his shame burned once more. He knew his boss had taken a kicking from the Super and yet she hadn’t chosen to pass it along. Knowing his boss, she wouldn’t have revealed who had messed up. He really wished she had done. Perversely, he was not concerned about the Super’s opinion of him. The opinion of his immediate boss was far more of a priority. And he didn’t know if the injury there was irrevocable.

  On the face of it she had been her normal self. She had made the calls along with the rest of them, but there was something missing, something fractured. A reason why she had looked at him less while doing it. There was something in her face she did not want him to see.

  He thought he knew what it was and it made him sick to the stomach.

  He sighed heavily and reached for the phone just as it started to ring.

  ‘Dawson,’ he answered.

  ‘Got a woman down here who saw the Dudley Star article online. Wants a word,’ Jack on the front desk said.

  Great, another walk in, he thought. He was never getting home tonight.

  ‘I’ll be down in a minute,’ he said.

  He took a swig of cold coffee and headed out the door. As he took the stairs he wondered which pile he’d file this one on once he’d finished.

  Perhaps it would be the ‘oh, I’m sorry, I’ve got the wrong night’ pile. Or the ‘it was a Mazda, Audi, MR2 car in the lay-by’ pile. He’d even had one witness insisting it was a Bentley.

  To say he’d learned his lesson was an understatement. It was exactly as the boss had said. The appeal for information had brought forward witnesses with bad memories instead of sticking to the people who were known to have been in the area.

  He keyed himself through to the reception and nodded in Jack’s direction.

  The woman was early to mid-fifties with a full head of tidy grey hair. She wore a dark blue uniform and a pair of grey crocs.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Dawson. Can I help you?’

  She held out her hand. ‘Mrs Lawson, I’m a nurse at the private hospital on Colman Hill. I’m here about the incident on Sunday night.’

  Dawson returned the firm, dry handshake.

  ‘Did you see the car?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘No, I didn’t see anything Sunday night,’ she explained.

  Dawson immediately knew what pile this lead was landing on.

  ‘But I didn’t need to,’ she said. ‘As soon as I read the article I knew exactly which car it was.’

  ‘How?’ he asked, frowning.

  ‘It’s my dream car, officer. I have that very car on my aspiration board at home. I look at it every day before I go to work.’

  Dawson still wasn’t sure where this was heading.

  ‘So you knew it was a Vauxhall—’

  ‘Well it’s not just a Vauxhall, is it, officer?’ she asked. ‘It’s a brand new Cascada Elite Convertible with heated front seats, eighteen inch alloys and the OnStar programme costing around thirty grand.’

  Dawson couldn’t help the tired smile that lifted his mouth.

  ‘I told you, it’s my dream car,’ she repeated. ‘And you don’t see that many of them in Colley Gate.’

  ‘So what exactly can you tell me, Mrs Lawson,’ he asked, politely.

  ‘I can tell you it was normally driven by an attractive woman in her late forties or early fifties but, more importantly, I can confirm that the car has been parked there many times before.’

  Dawson hid his surprise. This was not a fact that had come up before. His night at the station continued to stretch out in front of him but right now he didn’t care.

  New i
nformation was like an injection of pure adrenaline. This was a woman who remembered detail.

  He smiled as he opened the inner door.

  ‘Mrs Lawson, would you like to follow me?’

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  The building was not what Kim had been expecting, or hoping for, if she was honest.

  The gravel drive had guided her from the main road and wound through two rows of gnarly oak trees for a quarter of a mile before spitting her out at the edge of perfectly manicured lawns. Benches were dotted around an area being used as a bowling green. The star of the show was an imposing red-brick structure that had retained its seventeenth-century appearance with tall, narrow windows formed of smaller glass panes.

  Bardsley House was a wing within the Grantley Care facility. Situated four miles east of Chester town centre it housed the criminally insane. Externally it bore no sign of the madness within.

  Small groups were dotted around the lawns, but it was the house that took her breath away and brought the bile to the back of her throat.

  She eased the bike to a stop in front of the visitor parking sign and removed her helmet.

  She took a good, long look at the care facility that had housed her mother for the last twenty-eight years. Betrayal of her brother’s memory burned inside her at the surroundings where her mother lived.

  She suddenly remembered the day that Mikey’s dead body had been ripped from her arms.

  She had held on tightly until her fingers were gently prised away from his arms. Even though he’d been gone for two days the child inside her had still hoped the big people could save him.

  She had screamed as they removed him from her side. Although his body had no longer been warm from life, only from the radiator, her flesh had felt bereft when his presence was removed. Her six-year-old screams had pierced her own ears as she’d desperately begged for them not to take him away. Eventually her tortured cries had turned to uncontrollable sobs as she suffered that final goodbye.

  At that moment she had wanted to die. She had wanted to be carried out with her twin, so they would be together for ever.

  And then she had been swallowed by the blackness.

  It had taken two weeks in hospital to restore her health. The job of the medical staff made harder as they battled to save a life that had not wanted to be saved.

  She remembered being so close to Mikey that she could almost touch him. His pale, frightened face had loomed in the distance and she had ached to reach it, to be reunited with the tender, loving, sweet other half of herself.

  And yet the anger, the white hot rage that ran through her, would not let her rest. It nudged her back from the peace that beckoned like a recurring nightmare.

  It had always been the anger that had kept her alive.

  When she’d been strong enough a faceless stranger with blonde curly hair and a tired smile collected her from the hospital.

  A short, impersonal car ride deposited her at Fairview Hall on the outskirts of Tividale.

  The children’s home was new and ugly. It was a functional grey concrete slab that rose out of the ground. Tiny windows deeply recessed into the fabric of the building like cushion buttons.

  To the left was a foundry billowing out grey smoke day and night. To the right was a smelly recycling plant.

  The inside had been no warmer, despite the June sunshine.

  A brief conversation and the handover was complete.

  She was home.

  She was guided through corridors not unlike the ones she’d left in the hospital and deposited in a room on the second floor that had a window that was too high to reach.

  Two of the beds were personalised, their bedside cabinets awash with photos, costume jewellery, a notepad, a pair of glasses. The third one was stark.

  The woman placed a carrier bag on the bed. Kim knew it contained clothes. She didn’t know where they had come from but they were not hers. She had no items of her own.

  She shrunk away from the hand that touched her shoulder.

  ‘I’ll leave you to settle in,’ she said.

  Kim had known right away that she was never going to settle in. And she never had.

  And now she was observing these tranquil surroundings, the sign that pointed towards a ‘Deer Park’. She struggled to swallow the irony that she had been taken and deposited at the stark functionality of Fairview while her mother had been brought here and cared for in the tranquillity and grandeur of Bardsley House.

  She was about to enter the door marked reception when a voice sounded behind her.

  ‘Hello, may I help you?’

  Kim didn’t need to look around to know she was being addressed by Lily, the woman to whom she had spoken on the telephone for sixteen years.

  Despite the betrayal she couldn’t help the smile that formed on her face as she turned towards the familiar voice.

  The woman wore a colourful smock top that was loose over her generous proportions and a pair of plain black trousers. Her hair was dyed auburn and cut short. An owl motif dangled from each earlobe.

  This was a woman that was made for grandchildren, Kim couldn’t help thinking.

  It was easy to picture her cooking up a storm each Sunday lunchtime ready for a horde of children and toddlers.

  ‘Kim Stone,’ she said, extending her hand.

  A slow smile began to spread across the woman’s face. She ignored the outstretched hand and stepped forward, encasing Kim in a big warm hug.

  ‘Kim, I’m so pleased you’ve come,’ she said, finally stepping back. ‘After all these years… ’

  Kim knew the words were not a reproach. Lily had been asking her to visit for a long time and she had steadfastly refused.

  Kim didn’t like to admit that she was only here now because she wanted to know what her mother had that she would want.

  ‘I just—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You’re here now,’ she said, warmly.

  And now that she was here she had no idea how she’d thought this would play out. Her plan had consisted of getting here, taking whatever it was, and going home. The details had been sketchy.

  How did she get something from a woman whose very existence was like a constant kick to the stomach?

  Just knowing she was even in the area was bringing an ache to her jaw. But maybe she wouldn’t have to. Perhaps Lily would do it for her.

  ‘Follow me and we can have a chat,’ Lily said, stepping into the building.

  The reception area was unlike a hospital foyer. Comfortable wing-backed chairs littered the area, with occasional tables scattered throughout. Gentle watercolour paintings of local landscapes dotted the walls and pan pipes sounded gently from a speaker that rested above a CCTV camera.

  Kim slowed to a halt and looked around. ‘Nice place,’ she said, quietly.

  Lily halted alongside her and followed her gaze around the hallway. ‘It was, many years ago. Do you know the story?’

  Kim shook her head.

  ‘Bardsley House was built and then owned by the Bardsley family for two hundred years. In that time, it saw seven murders, a suicide and a curse that no female ensconced within would live beyond her fortieth birthday.

  ‘The seventh and last generation Bardsley pooh poohed the curse until his wife was taken ill at the tender age of thirty-seven. In 1887 he moved to one of the farmer’s cottages and gifted the house to the local council, believing that his charitable act would lift the curse for ever.’

  Kim didn’t believe in curses but that was one hell of a history.

  Lily continued. ‘We use only one quarter of the building now. We get no more money than any other state facility and it works on a headcount. We stretch it as far as we can but the ‘no sale’ clause in the gift prevents the local council from profiting from the building or land. Mr Bardsley did not want any other families suffering the same fate as his own.’

  Kim hoped her expression reflected her feelings. She wasn’t here for a tour.

  ‘Come on, let?
??s go and have a chat,’ Lily said.

  Kim followed her through a deserted hallway and stopped short of a key coded door.

  A quick left and they were in a small office with a single desk wedged against the wall. There were no filing cabinets but two shelves on the longest wall crammed with text books and medical journals. Some variations of a rota covered in red pen were scattered over the desk.

  ‘Bloody admin,’ she said, pushing them aside. Kim sat on the chair to the left of the desk. It felt like a doctor’s visit.

  ‘So, what brings you here, Kim?’ Lily asked, facing her.

  Despite her warm greeting, Kim understood that Lily’s priority was her charges, her patients. After years of trying to persuade her to visit her mother she would be naturally suspicious of her sudden appearance.

  ‘The letters,’ Kim said.

  Lily frowned. ‘Ah, yes we’ve been trying to get to the back of that. Are you quite sure they didn’t come from you?’

  Kim raised one eyebrow. Yes, she was sure.

  ‘We no longer have the envelopes to check the postmark but neither myself nor the staff recall anything suspicious. Do you have any idea who would have done this?’

  ‘No,’ Kim said, quickly.

  She had spent too many hours of her life trying to explain the evil that was Alexandra Thorne. She could not cope with that look of disbelief again.

  ‘What I don’t understand is that clearly the letters were designed for a positive effect,’ Lily said.

  Oh, you can’t even begin to understand how wrong you are, Kim thought. Alex knew that it was imperative to Kim’s own well-being that her mother remain in this place, although she now knew it wasn’t the kind of place that had lived in her mind all those years.

  Okay, maybe she hadn’t pictured her mother in a damp, dark, smelly windowless basement chained to the wall, with a metal tray skidded in her direction a couple of times a day. But neither had she imagined the grandeur of a stately home surrounded by people who were genuinely caring and compassionate.