‘He did mention the name of a place,’ says Jack, as he opens the car door. ‘A children’s home in Wales.’
‘Why was it important?’
‘He said Eugene Green had gone there.’
I hand him my business card with my pager number. He looks at the small square of cardboard and runs his thumb over the edges. ‘It could have been me, you know; I could have been at the flat, not Harley.’
At that moment he looks at me like a man who has lost trust in his own shadow. ‘Catch them, will you? Give me something to tell Nicole.’
9
Evie
Usually I get advance warning when Cyrus visits me at Langford Hall. He sends a message, or Davina yells along the corridor, making some crack about my boyfriend being here. Today he just turns up, waltzing into my room without knocking.
‘You can’t just burst in on me,’ I say angrily. ‘I could have been naked.’
‘The door was open.’
‘I could have been doing something private.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know. Masturbating.’
‘Were you masturbating?’
‘Ew! No.’
‘I could come back when you’re finished.’
‘Don’t be disgusting. I don’t have my face on.’
‘You don’t need make-up for me. I’ve told you that.’
I feel my cheeks flush and hate the feeling. Stupid girl. Foolish girl.
Cyrus laughs, which makes it worse. ‘You weren’t worried about being naked at the police station.’
‘That bitch told you!’
‘Caroline called and said you’d been mistakenly arrested, but it all worked out.’
‘The police are pigs.’
‘I work for the police.’
‘Yeah, well, enough said.’
He looks at me like a disappointed parent, only he’s not my parent, or my foster carer. He was once, but we managed to fuck that up.
‘Did you bring Poppy?’ I ask.
‘What do you think?’
I grab my hoodie.
‘Put some shoes on,’ he says.
‘I’m fine.’
I run barefoot along the corridor until I reach the nurses’ station. I tap on the glass. Davina looks up from her computer. I mouth the word ‘please’ and point to the outside door. Cyrus has caught up to me. Davina flashes him a smile. She fancies him, it’s so bloody obvious. And she’s got a bloke at home and a baby boy.
She unlocks the door remotely. My beautiful black Labrador goes batshit crazy when she sees me, wagging her tail like she might break in half. She leaps into my arms, knocking me backwards, licking my laughing face. Poppy is the reason I stay sane. Poppy loves me unconditionally. Poppy is my family.
‘How have you been?’ asks Cyrus, when I finally sit on the bench next to him.
‘The same.’
‘Are you sleeping?’
‘Are you?’
We always start this way. Cyrus can’t help acting like a shrink, even when he tries to be normal. Langford Hall looks like a three-star motorway hotel from this angle, or a nursing home for dementia patients prone to wandering off. I throw a stick. Poppy chases.
‘Did you ever meet a man called Eugene Green?’ Cyrus asks, dropping in the question like we’re tossing pebbles into a pond.
‘Who’s he?’
He pulls out a photograph of a fat-faced man with steel-wool hair, red cheeks and a downturned mouth. It’s one of the photographs that police take when you get arrested, with a height chart at the side.
‘Recognise him?’
‘Nope.’
He has more photographs. He makes me look at each picture.
‘Why are you showing me these?’
He adds another image. I snatch a breath and look away, squeezing my eyes shut. When I open them again, it’s the same picture: a young boy is standing on a concrete ramp with one foot resting on a skateboard. He’s dressed in jeans and brightly coloured trainers, with different coloured laces on each shoe.
‘You’ve seen him.’ I can hear the excitement in Cyrus’s voice.
I shake my head.
‘You reacted, Evie.’
‘No.’
He touches my arm. I pull away.
‘His name is Patrick Comber. He went missing seven years ago. Eugene Green was suspected of taking him.’
‘Why don’t you ask this Eugene Green?’
‘I would, but he’s dead.’
I flinch.
‘Where did you see this boy?’ he asks.
‘I didn’t.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘How the fuck would you know?’ I explode. ‘I’m the one who can tell, remember?’
He ignores my outburst. ‘Patrick has a family … people who love him.’
The word family puts a bad taste in my mouth. I want to yell at him to leave me alone; to stop analysing me and looking into my past. I don’t want him to discover the truth about me – what they did to me, what I became. People think Terry Boland was a monster who kept me locked in a secret room. They called him an evil pervert who raped me and burned me with cigarettes. None of that is true. They don’t know the whole story. The real story. How it began …
I thought Terry was a giant when I first met him. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen, with arms like legs of ham, covered in tattoos that had faded and merged into a mottled blue mess. He had a crooked nose and bushy eyebrows and hair cut so short that it stood up like a scrubbing brush.
Terry was supposed to wear a coat and tie when he drove the Merc, like a proper chauffeur, but as soon as we were clear of the big house, he would shrug off his coat and loosen the tie and undo the top button of his shirt. He had a chain around his neck with a small silver medallion. He told me later that it was a medal of St Anthony, the patron saint of lost things. ‘You pray to him when you lose your car keys, or your wallet, or your phone, and he helps you find them.’
I wanted to ask whether St Anthony also found lost families, but I didn’t speak to Terry for the longest time. I wouldn’t even look at him. Instead, I curled up on the back seat and covered my face. Terry didn’t seem to mind. He talked as though we were having proper conversations, commenting on the weather or the scenery or pulling random facts out of the air, like the time I sneezed and Terry said, ‘Bless you’ and told me if someone forces their eyes open and sneezes, their eyeballs can pop out. Who discovers something like that?
I began sneaking glances at him in the mirror while he was driving. Sometimes, he’d catch me looking and I’d pretend I was cleaning my fingernails. His eyes were soft. Not like the other men, who had hard eyes, or hungry eyes.
One day I fell asleep before Terry came to collect me. He carried me to the Merc. I breathed him in, the sweat and oil and mint. I put my face close to his shirt and it filled my nose.
Terry rode a motorbike when he wasn’t driving the Merc. I would hear him pulling into the courtyard beside the kitchen, parking under the big tree, where he took off his helmet and unbuckled his leather jacket. While he changed his clothes, I waited downstairs. Dressed up. Looking pretty. Sometimes I wore pinafore dresses, or tunic frocks, or a school uniform. Mrs Quinn would do my hair in pigtails, or ribbons, or a single woven plait that fell down my back.