Ready or Not (43 page)

             
              Chris surveyed the scene on the warehouse floor. He looked at Matthew, his body covered now; his blood soaking through the sheeting that had been placed over his chest. He couldn’t begin to think how Matthew had been involved in all this, or why, but assumed Kate would fill him in as soon as they’d escaped the madness.

             
              His eyes moved towards Neil Davies, his body twisted awkwardly on the warehouse floor. ‘Sophie said he’s…’ He couldn’t finish the sentence.

             
              ‘So he said,’ Kate said, answering the question he was unable to ask. She looked at Neil’s body – at Daniel, so long sought after - and could feel nothing.

             
              ‘Do you think it’s true?’

             
              She remembered the blue eyes; the invisible pull that had drawn her close to him. ‘I don’t know,’ she lied. ‘But I suppose we’ll find out.’

             
              ‘What about Matthew?’ Chris asked. He couldn’t tell her about Andrew Langley, not now. All that could wait until she’d had a bit of time to recover.

             
              Kate shook her head. ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘It’s a long story.’

             
              Claire was being helped from her seat by one of the armed response team. The man held her tentatively by the arm as though she may fall over if he let her go. She held out a hand as Kate and Chris passed her.

             
              ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

             
              Kate tilted her head. ‘What for?’

             
              ‘I’m sorry he found you.’

             
              Claire was carried out on a stretcher by one of the ambulance teams. Kate’s eyes followed her. Claire knew, she thought. All the time she’d been hiding Ben at her house and throughout the phone conversation they’d had just yesterday, she must have known that Kate was his sister. She wasn’t scared of him, Kate thought bitterly. In some sick kind of way, Claire had enjoyed the excitement and attention that being part of Neil’s nasty little secret had given her.

             
              She could have been killed. Ben and Sophie could have been killed, and Claire would have allowed it to happen.

             
              Chris reached for Kate again, pulling her back to him and distracting her from her thoughts. He looked down at her.

             
              ‘I thought I’d lost you,’ he said.

             
              She managed a smile. ‘No such luck, I’m afraid.’

             
              He held her close to his chest and breathed in the scent of her shampoo. For years he had tried to repress his feelings for her, as if pretending they didn’t exist would make them stop.

             
              Never again, he thought.

Three
Months Later

Sixty Three

Kate stared at the photographs and files strewn across Andrew Langley’s desk. Hundreds of them, it seemed to her; years of work that had amounted to this: reams of paper and an even greater number of regrets
, stacked in a pile of reports and photos. She remembered standing outside Andrew’s hospital room, too guilty to show her face inside as his family – his wife, daughter, son-in-law and first grandchild - gathered around his bed, welcoming him back to the land of the living. How could she show her face before them, find even the slightest of words to say, when it was her family – her history – that had almost cost him his life?

             
              ‘Where would you like to begin?’

             
              She was snapped from her daydream as Andrew entered the office with their tea. What was it Sophie had once said about tea, Kate asked herself: something about people using it in the vain hope of distracting themselves from the realities of their situation, or words to that effect. She took the hot mug from Andrew and nodded gratefully. Sophie had been right.

             
              ‘Where would you suggest?’

             
              Andrew gathered a selection of photographs together: images of Kate outside the station, Kate at the local supermarket, her father in his front garden: the home in which she’d spent her childhood.

             
              ‘You’re very good,’ she mused, sipping at the tea.

             
              Andrew smiled, but the look was tinged with sadness. ‘Regretfully,’ he said.

             
              He gestured to the chair opposite his desk; a large, high-backed, cushioned chair that Kate assumed was intended to make the person seated in it feel relaxed, at ease. Try as she might to lose herself within it, she could feel neither or these things.

             
              ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like someone here with you?’ Andrew said, although he had already asked this several times. ‘Chris?’

             
              Kate shook her head. She would hear it for herself first and give herself time to get things straightened out in her own head before sharing it with Chris. It might take her a day, might take her a month; she wouldn’t know until she’d had it all lain out before her; all the facts in all their naked, horrifying truth.

             
              ‘Let’s just get it done, shall we?’

             
              Andrew took a sip of his tea, sat forward in his chair with his hands clasped together on the desk, and sighed.

             
              ‘Ok,’ he began. ‘Neil Davies first approached me in the New Year of 2007. He and his wife, Sarah, along with their two children had moved here from East Manchester, where they had met at a student party. He had grown up in a children’s home in the East Anglia – I’ve done all the checks. He was there from 1983 to 1992. During that time he met Matthew Curtis.’

             
              ‘Matthew’s parents?’ Kate asked, already knowing the answer. She had no reason anymore to doubt what Neil…Daniel…had told her that night. Daniel, her brother: proven by DNA tests.

             
              ‘They were both killed in a house fire. Matthew was a few months old. It was put down to an electrical fault somewhere – the house hadn’t been rewired in God knows how long. Anyway, his mother managed to get Matthew out of the building, but she went back inside for her husband. Neither of them made it back out.’

             
              Kate put her tea on the desk. She felt a sickening in her stomach; a churning that made her throat and cheeks begin to colour. Matthew was a good kid, she thought. He was a child, just a child, with tragic beginnings and he had fallen into the wrong hands.

             
              Daniel’s.

             
              ‘Shall we stop?’ Andrew asked, eyeing her with concern.

             
              Kate shook her head. ‘Sorry,’ she said, waving a hand. ‘I’m fine, honestly.’

             
              ‘Who knows what kind of friendship or bond those two formed during their time in that place?’ Andrew continued, absent-mindedly thumbing the only picture of the two he had been able to locate; taken from a nurse who had worked in the home. Kate had seen the photo, once, and asked never to see it again. There was the brother she had lost that day: his innocent smile replaced with something else entirely; something vacant and already sinister.

             
              ‘The children’s home was closed in 1997 after a series of allegations of abuse. There was a lengthy inquiry into what had been going on behind closed doors, but the full truth was never revealed. The scaled down version was grim enough. We’ll never know, but what we do now know is that Daniel obviously had a strong hold over Matthew, for whatever reason it may have been. Enough to manipulate him into assisting with years of revenge, by the looks of it.’

             
              ‘Why did they move to South Wales?’ Kate asked. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence.’

             
              ‘It’s not a coincidence,’ Andrew said, shaking his head. ‘Daniel was three when he went missing, yes? Very young, but not quite young enough to lose all recollection of events. The human mind is a clever and deceitful thing, Kate. It can trick us into believing that we’ve forgotten things: names, facts; where we left our car keys. Memories. Most of the time those things haven’t been forgotten, they’ve simply been relocated in the brain. It takes a sight, a sound – something incongruous to trigger the memory and bring it all back.’

             
              ‘So, what are you saying? Daniel remembered being taken?’

             
              ‘Not at first,’ Andrew said, riffling through the files. ‘Although he always knew that his name had been Daniel. The couple who had him before he went to the children’s home gave him the name Neil. I’ll come back to them. Like I was saying, he didn’t remember being taken. Not until he saw this.’

             
              He took one of the files from the pile in front of him and opened it, pushing it across the desk to Kate. It was a Christmas card; a snow scene of a castle and its surroundings.

             
              She opened it. To Sue, the card said. Merry Christmas, love from Tracy. Kate looked up from the card.

             
              ‘They worked at the children’s home,’ Andrew explained. ‘The card was in the office. Daniel was eight at the time. He saw it, it triggered something: he took it. He kept it for over twenty years.’

             
              Kate turned the card in her hands. The castle, the moat, the snow: it was a replica of the scene she too had been haunted by all those years.

             
              ‘How easy was it for you to find me?’ she asked quietly, not looking up from the card. She was too ashamed to make eye contact: embarrassed that this man had succeeded where she had failed. Had she managed to find Daniel, would she have been able to stop everything that had followed?

             
              This was her fault; her doing.

             
              Andrew seemed to sense her thoughts. ‘It was easy for me,’ he said. ‘The internet has made a whole load of things very easy. A castle…a missing boy named Daniel…he didn’t need me to find out who he was. But he needed me to find you.’

             
              The photograph was in Kate’s lap now. She fought back tears and continued to keep her head lowered, afraid to show weakness in front of this man who knew more about her family and her past than she did.

             
              ‘This is my fault,’ she said softly.

             
              Andrew leaned forward. ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘None of this is your fault.’ He sat back and sighed. ‘It’s your father’s.’

             
              Kate ran the back of her hand hastily across her eyes. ‘What?’

             
              It was his turn to avoid eye contact. She watched as he moved files to the floor and sifted through those remaining on the desk. ‘Julie Davies,’ he said, finding the file he’d been looking for. He moved another photograph across the table; an old, speckled, poor-quality picture of a greying woman in her late-forties, deep creases lining her sun-tightened skin. She smiled at the camera, a forced smile that showed too many teeth and exaggerated the crow’s feet that pinched at the corners of her eyes.

             
              ‘This is the woman who took Daniel from the castle grounds. Her name was Julie Davies. As you can imagine, a nightmare to find with a name that common. Anyway, I didn’t find her – not exactly. She died in 1983. Cancer.’

             
              Kate’s head was throbbing with names, dates, and words that made no sense to her. She looked away from the photo, sat back and pressed her head into the cushioned chair.

             
              ‘You said it’s my father’s fault,’ Kate said quietly. ‘How was it my father’s fault?’

             
              ‘Julie Davies was told at a young age that she wouldn’t be able to have children then at forty-three she finds herself pregnant, against all the odds. She had a boy, a little blond haired son…’

             
              ‘This is all very lovely,’ Kate said, standing quickly, ‘but what the hell does this have to do with my father?!’

             
              Andrew Langley was taken aback by Kate’s uncharacteristic abruptness. He raised his eyebrows and gestured to Kate’s chair without speaking. She sat down obediently, ashamed at her behaviour and her outburst.

             
              ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

             
              ‘It’s understandable. I just feel that if we go through this – all of it – in order then all your questions will be answered.’

             
              Kate doubted that was true but said nothing. This man had been through enough because of her family; it wasn’t for her to give him any more unnecessary grief.              

             
              ‘Julie’s child was knocked off his bike by a car. It was ten past four in the afternoon and the driver was drunk. The boy survived three days and then died.’

             
              ‘Am I supposed to feel sorry for her?’ Kate asked, and even she was surprised by the harsh edge to her tone; her voice, her words, sounding so callous, so cold, and so unlike hers. ‘She lost a child and that’s terrible, awful. But does that give her the right to put another family through the same thing? Does that give her the right to steal someone else’s child?’

             
              ‘She didn’t,’ Andrew said bluntly. ‘Your father gave him to her.’

             
              Kate laughed. The sound was sudden, loud and harsh and seemed to echo around the small office. She raised a hand and pushed her hair from her face. ‘Right,’ she said through a forced smile. ‘So, my father gives his son to some woman who’s lost hers. How charitable of him.’

             
              She turned to the window and looked out at the street below. She hated herself when she was like this: blunt, cruel and sarcastic. They were the characteristics Chris hated the most, but she’d never confessed to him that she loathed them just as he did.

             
              Kate put a hand to the soft, barely-there swell of her stomach and breathed deeply, willing herself to stay calm. Her baby – Chris’ baby – had been conceived just weeks earlier and they’d decided not to tell anyone yet. It had been completely unexpected and Sophie and Ben weren’t ready for that sort of news yet. Let them try to return to some kind of normality first.

             
              ‘What did your parents argue about, Kate? After Daniel went missing?’

             
              Kate moved her hand to the window glass and rested her forehead against it. ‘The things you’d expect them to argue over,’ she said. ‘Who was to blame. Who should have been there.’

             
              ‘Anything else?’ Andrew pressed. ‘Anything that seemed odd or unusual?’

             
              ‘My brother had gone missing,’ Kate spoke against the window. ‘Everything was unusual.’