But Heath hadn’t always been outside. He’d taken Teddy to Lily’s, too. It let him control Sophie, allowing him to do things without a little boy around. And it got Teddy used to being looked after by someone else. So that’s where Heath had decided to leave him, in the end. Before he …
To break my thoughts, I leant forward and gave Charlotte a squeeze. ‘Really, I’m OK. Have you got hold of Dad yet, to let him know?’ I wanted to distract her from her fretting.
Because she came through for me, in the end. She’d come round that afternoon, as she’d told me she would, only to see my car in the drive, and me not answering the door. She let herself in, and found the place empty. She probably missed us by just a few minutes.
Next she tried to get through to my phone, ringing unanswered in the footwell of his car. Charlotte had panicked: at what I might have done. ‘Something stupid,’ is all she’ll say. So she’d called 999, and they’d sent round two officers in a patrol car. But that wasn’t enough for her; she’d gone into the kitchen and seen Nicholls’s card, tucked by the phone. She called him too.
So they were already looking for us, a patrol car parked in my drive, when we drove up in Heath’s car and ran into Lily’s cottage. It was PC Kaur, the officer who’d been round to check after the intruder in my house, who found us there. His mouth dropped open when he saw me, covered in blood; it got wider still when he took in Sophie behind me, her ghostly pallor, and the little boy in her arms, his blond curls too long.
‘There is a body in the park,’ I told Kaur, ‘in the outhouse nearest the car park. It’s Dr Heath.’
And I just kept repeating it, throughout, as more people arrived, gathering in the drive. ‘Dr Heath,’ I keep saying, ‘he did it. He took Sophie.’
Then I saw Nicholls, coming out of my house, his suit crumpled.
‘And he killed Nancy,’ I said, over their heads. He stopped right there. He looked young for a second, just like his school picture. He really didn’t know, I realised.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said more softly. ‘She’s dead. And he did it. Nick Heath.’
49
I’m not going to go to court. Nicholls told me the other morning, sitting at my kitchen table in his suit, after driving round on his own. He’d heard through people he’d worked with at the Crown Prosecution Service: no one wants to prosecute a mother acting in clear self-defence. There’s a lot of attention on them, of course. Everyone from the broadsheets to breakfast shows wants to talk to me.
I have already talked until I am hoarse. The police have been polite but thorough, running through my story again and again. But they believed me from the start – I could see it in their eyes. Sophie and Teddy have been treated with kid gloves, of course, assigned social workers and ‘given time to heal’, as they put it. In time, if she wants, she can tell their story to the world.
That morning, I thought Nicholls would go after passing on the news and asking after them both. They were playing in the garden and we’d watched them for a moment through the window, while we drank our coffees. But he didn’t seem in a rush to leave, so I just brought it up. A lot had become clear to me by then, from the police officers who interviewed me and what was written in the papers, but I wanted to hear it from him. It was the first chance I’d had to speak to him properly – he’d had to step away from the case, once it became clear that what happened to Nancy and Sophie fell under one investigation.
‘You know, for a moment, I thought it was you who took Sophie,’ I said. ‘I saw that school photo, of you and Nancy, and realised – you’re Jay.’
He didn’t speak for a second. ‘I was Jay,’ he said slowly. ‘After we left – my family moved down south – no one called me that any more. It was supposed to be a fresh start. But I always liked it here.’ He turned to me. ‘Heath would have been in that photo too, if you’d had time to look at it. He probably realised that.’
‘If I’d had time …’ I remembered, again, that wary look on Heath’s face when I told him it was Jay – Nicholls – who’d been keeping Sophie at Parklands, revealing that I didn’t suspect him. I think it was then that he changed his mind about what he was about to do to me. ‘I suppose it was safer to get me to that isolated building, rather than do anything there.’
But I did get one thing right: it wasn’t entirely coincidental that Nicholls was looking into Sophie’s case.
‘It struck a chord, I suppose. That was partly why I got into policing. I felt like no one was looking out for her after she left.’ He grimaced a little. ‘I mean Nancy, of course.
‘Though I didn’t exactly advertise that part of my past. They said we’d argued – we hadn’t. But people talk.’ I nodded. And I wondered if Heath, unnoticed, didn’t help it along a little.
‘I transferred forces, back up here, a few years ago. I was on major investigations, working nearer the city centre. I hadn’t really heard about Sophie, until all this. I moved to this division about a year ago now, working closer to Amberton and, well, where I grew up.
‘So when Sophie’s call came through’ – he rubbed the back of his head – ‘it felt close to home, in a lot of ways. I wanted to make sure there was nothing more we could do. But it seemed quite clear cut. And when the diary emerged, suggesting it was her pregnancy and her crappy boyfriend’ – I smiled to hear him sound less than perfectly professional – ‘I thought, no wonder this kid doesn’t want to come home.’
‘I could tell.’
He frowned. ‘I shouldn’t have communicated that. But I had wondered if something like that had happened to Nancy. That she was scared of what her parents might do, or say.’
‘That’s what Heath wanted everyone to think. That we’d failed Sophie.’
‘Yes. But still … something about it – it was too neat, that diary emerging when it did. So I kept an eye on it all. When you said someone had been in your garden, and I realised where you lived, I came and looked round Nancy’s house—’
‘Where I saw you,’ I interrupted. ‘I thought you seemed …’
‘Shifty,’ he fills in for me. ‘Maybe. I told myself I was just doing my job, but it was more than that. It made me think – what could I have done differently, after Nancy disappeared. Because it had never made sense to me. Anyway, I kept paying attention. When I saw the repeat caller records, it seemed like you were …’
‘Losing it,’ I said bluntly. ‘And you knew about my past.’
‘Your husband had mentioned it, when he came in to discuss the diary.’ He looked down. I could imagine the spin Mark put on all that. It’s easier to blame someone else than to look at your own failings.
And of course there was Heath, all the time, pouring poison in my family’s ears.
That’s another thing that’s come out. After I’d overdosed, I’d given permission for him, as my GP, to liaise with my family. He’d said it was a good idea. And I’d never rescinded it, I had never even thought. So he’d been hiding behind a veil of concern, updating them on my mental health, encouraging them to check in with me and him – in case, say, I reacted badly to Mark’s new girlfriend, had they heard about that, actually? Not to alarm them, oh, not at all, but he did have a few worries …
He was finding out what I was up to and, later, laying the ground. So if something were ever to happen to me …
Everyone trusts a doctor, after all.
People have suggested, tactfully, that I might have been mistaken: that I could be reading too much into my dreams. And maybe I’ll never know for sure. That dark figure I’d dream about, leaning over my bed … The police said that it would have been very unlikely, that it was too big a risk for him to take, to enter my house more than once.
But I know. I remember that night I woke up to find that presence, waiting, breathing, on the other side of my bedroom door – expecting me to be asleep. He’d told me to keep taking the pills.