She stood, just for a moment, in the shadow of the harbour wall, in the tepid few centimetres of water lapping at the sand, and looked out to the horizon where a cruise ship was slowly crossing from right to left. Her first holiday with Alec had been to the Lake District, and they had stood like this looking out over Windermere as Alec had burbled on about how the lake had been formed by glaciers.
She had pretended to be interested. ‘The glacier kind of scooped it out?’
And he’d opened his mouth and shut it again, and smiled at her, and said, ‘Pretty much.’
She’d learned later that his mother had told him not to ‘pontificate at the poor girl’.
She closed her eyes.
Beckie’s voice said, ‘Boats have barnacles. Maybe there’s some on that one… Yes, look! Connor, come and see! If you lie here you can see them, you can see their tentacle things. They aren’t actually tentacles, they’re legs, but they don’t need legs to walk so evolution has made them into swishers to swish the food into their mouths. See!’
‘Aye, mad. Check that one, swishing like a bastard.’
‘And they’ve got the longest – you-know-whats of any creature compared with the size of their body, so they can reach other barnacles and – you know.’
She couldn’t breathe.
She wasn’t imagining this. That really was Beckie’s voice. And that must be Connor Johnson. The voices were coming from the other side of the harbour wall.
‘Ex-rated, eh, Beckie?’
A silence. Then:
‘I hate your dad, Connor.’
‘Aye, well, join the club. Hey, Beckie. Hey, it’s okay hen.’
And now Flora was running up the sand, running round the end of the wall and into the harbour and Beckie, it really was Beckie, lying on her stomach on the stone quay with her face pressed against her bare arm.
Connor Johnson was patting her back.
How had her legs got so long?
And her hair was cropped short like a boy’s. And her ears – what had happened to her ears? They weren’t pixie any more. They didn’t stick out from her head at all.
It was Beckie?
Then the boy looked up and said, ‘Aw Jesus’ and the girl looked up and –
‘Mum?’
And Flora was running along the quay towards them, saying ‘Beckie!’ over and over again, and Beckie’s face was alight and she was scrambling to her feet, but then the smile was gone and she was backing away.
She was actually backing away.
And the joy in her face had been replaced by –
Oh God.
Flora stopped dead. ‘Beckie, darling! Listen – I don’t know what they’ve been telling you, I don’t know what lies they’ve told you about me but –’
‘You killed Dad.’ Her voice was carefully controlled.
‘Oh Beckie, no! Of course not! That was Ryan Johnson. The police know that now. When they catch him, he’s going to prison for what he did.’
‘You told me you killed him. So don’t lie.’
‘I never told you that! You know I didn’t. How could you think I would kill Dad?’ She took a step towards her.
Beckie took another step back. ‘You wrote me a letter and you said you never wanted me to contact you again and you killed Dad –’
‘Oh, no, darling. No. I never wrote a letter saying that. Lorraine must have faked it.’
Beckie was still backing up, tears coursing down her cheeks. ‘Don’t lie!’
The boy suddenly spoke. ‘She’s no lying, Becks.’ He was a tall young man, in a blue T-shirt and dark jeans, with a gentle face. ‘That was Maw. That was Maw wrote that letter, right enough, making out she was your maw. She telt you, Beckie, that your maw didnae want nothing to do with you, and she telt your maw the same thing about you, but it wasnae true. I’m sorry, hen. I’m that sorry, eh?’ His face had gone bright red.
Beckie was crying.
And Beckie never cried.
She was crying and staring at Flora.
‘So do you – do you – do you still want me really?’
‘Oh darling!’ And in three strides Beckie was in her arms and Flora was saying, ‘My darling, my darling, I don’t want anything else in the whole wide world.’
But now someone was shouting, footsteps pounded on the stone quay and the boy was saying ‘Aw Christ’ and ‘Let them be, Maw’ and then she felt herself pulled back by the shoulders and oh God, how stupid she’d been, how stupid not to call the police, not to call Victor and his brother straight away, and then Caroline’s face was filling her vision, Caroline’s voice was saying ‘Hiya Flora’ and then she was being flung backwards, stumbling, and hard fingers closed round her arms and the stale stench of cigarettes and BO engulfed her as she twisted to come face to face with Jed Johnson.
He grinned at her.
‘Mum!’
Caroline had Beckie trapped in her arms. A new Caroline, a flabby Caroline with dirty blonde streaks in her hair.
Lorraine Johnson.
‘She’s no your Mum, hen!’
Flora kicked back against Jed’s legs and he grunted, and she managed to get her hand into her pocket, to close her fingers around her mobile phone, to pull it out –
It was snatched from her hand by soft white fingers.
A hugely fat woman was standing between her and Beckie and Caroline, smiling at her. ‘Oops.’ Without looking, the woman flicked her bloated fingers to toss the phone neatly into the water.
And the last piece of the puzzle fell into place.
It was the ‘Lorraine Johnson’ who’d come to the door at Gardens Terrace.
The family resemblance was striking.
‘Please,’ said Flora. ‘Please, just let Beckie go.’
‘Please!’ mimicked Jed in her ear.
‘Mands, get the weans in that wee café, aye, while we have ourselves a wee chat with this bitch? Connor son, get on the blower to that fuckwit Travis, tell him to get that fucking people carrier back here pronto cos we’ve got ourselves a wee situation, aye? Fucking mad bitch has only been and attacked Beckie.’
‘She didn’t!’ Beckie wailed. ‘You’re just pretending! You’re just pretending Mum is a bad person to make me stay with you but she isn’t!’
With all the strength of her new prison gym-toned body, Flora stamped down on Jed’s foot and drove her elbow back into his body.
‘Fuckin’ –’
And she thrust her hand back into the pocket of her jeans to pull out the flick-knife. She depressed the button and the wicked five-inch blade shot out of the casing and she lunged at Jed’s tattooed naked torso.
The next thing she knew she was slamming into the stone surface of the quay, all the breath thumped out of her lungs, and the knife was bouncing away from her towards Caroline’s foot. And a hard body smacked down on top of her, Jed’s hands in her hair, pulling her head up as she gasped for the air she couldn’t suck into her lungs.
Caroline looked down at her. ‘Like Mands said: Oops. See that, Beckie-hen? That’s a flick-knife and they’re fucking illegal, but when you’re a fucking serial killer that’s no gonnae give you many sleepless nights, eh? What were you gonnae do with that, Flora? Stick it in Beckie?’