The Bad Things: A gripping crime thriller full of twists and turns. Mary-Jane Riley

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

       8

      The rain had eased off by the time Alex reached the caravan site at the harbour end, but still she pulled her scarf up around her face. The rain might have stopped, but the wind was still strong enough to make skin sore, especially when combined with the salt from sea spray. The sea looked rough and wild, too, and you couldn’t tell where the greyness of the sky bleached into the greyness of the sea. Plenty of white horses rolled into the shore, only broken up by the groynes that stretched out like witches’ fingers into the water. Seagulls swooped and screeched overhead, and in the distance the smooth, ping-pong dome of the nuclear power station rose like a modernist sculpture.

      The caravan site, rather obviously called ‘Harbour’s End’ was, as it said on the tin, at the end of the harbour road and opposite the lifeboat station. At its entrance were the public toilets.

      She looked at the piece of paper that had the directions to the caravan on it; the cold air making her shiver. Number forty-four. Down the main bit of road, turn second left, and it was at the end of the row.

      The wind moaned in and around the lines of static caravans. She saw the odd person in the distance, tending to the outside of the vans, but generally it was very quiet. A ghost town.

      Jackie Wood’s caravan, which was cream and green with a lick of decay, just like the other hundred or so, was opposite the river that ran into the sea, with a good view of the fishermen’s ramshackle huts and the row upon row of fishing boats, some from Lowestoft, some from Aldeburgh, most from Sole Bay. There were net curtains at the windows, and a couple of terracotta pots either side of the door, sporting fronds of grass and dead twigs. Alex stopped, realizing she was shivering not just from the cold, but also because she felt lost, a bit frightened even. What was she expecting Jackie Wood to say? Come on, she told herself, treat this like any other interview.

      She thought back to the last time she’d seen Wood, before the court case. She was being interviewed on the News Channel – News 24 as it was then – sitting in her flat, Martin Jessop by her side. Mr Jessop from upstairs. Nice flats they were too; a well done Georgian conversion in a decent part of town. Nobody wanted to rent them after Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop were arrested for murder. They were holiday lets now; completely repainted, redecorated, rehabilitated. There was a campaign to get the whole block demolished and a memorial garden planted. But the Sole Bay Society put their boots in and saved the Georgian building. It didn’t really matter to Alex – Georgian building or memorial garden – it was still where her nephew and niece had been murdered.

      When they first went missing, there she was, Jackie Wood, sitting next to him – the murderer – and saying what a tragedy it was. How the community had to pull together, that they were pulling together, and were organizing searches of the town, the beaches, the dunes, the harbour. The local and national media were hungry for interviewees about ‘the situation’, and Jackie Wood and Martin Jessop fitted the willing bill. Wood, the local librarian; Jessop, a lecturer at the college in Ipswich. There was much speculation about their relationship. Again, something else the media wanted to romanticize; document every twist and turn.

      If only they had known there was a much better story than that.

      If she closed her eyes, Alex could still see her, head cocked slightly to one side, the furrowed forehead, the oh-so-sympathetic expression. He, meanwhile, just looked at his shoes. Then, suddenly, he gazed at the camera and shook his head.

      ‘They were lovely children,’ he said. ‘So polite. Full of life.’

      Past tense.

      And she remembered knowing then; knowing absolutely that they were the ones who had taken the twins.

      When they were arrested, the feeding frenzy really started.

      ‘She is in,’ said a voice from behind her, interrupting her memories. ‘She’s always in.’

      Alex looked over her shoulder. A woman of about thirty with a cigarette in one hand, mug in the other, was standing in the doorway of the caravan opposite. The dark roots were showing in her hair, and her face had lost the fresh-skin look of youth. Alex wondered what she was doing in a caravan on the Suffolk coast in the middle of winter.

      ‘I came this way looking for work.’ The woman had read her mind. ‘Thought it might be easier here than in the city.’

      She wondered which city she meant. ‘And has it been easier?’ she asked.

      The woman shrugged. ‘No, not really. But I have got a few shifts at the Tesco’s on the high street, so I reckon that’s better than nothing.’

      Alex nodded. The idea of a new supermarket in the middle of the town had caused a lot of local consternation when planning permission was granted. There were petitions, and placards, and letters to the planning office and the local MP, and God knows who, but it had lumbered forward like a boulder rolling down a hill squashing everything in its path.

      ‘Anyway,’ the woman went on, ‘give her a knock.’

      ‘Thanks,’ Alex said.

      ‘Do you know her?’

      ‘Sort of.’ She managed to give a rictus smile.

      ‘She looks familiar.’

      ‘Really?’

      The woman shrugged. ‘Tell her she can come over and have a coffee if she wants. Wouldn’t want her feeling lonely here.’

      Alex nodded. ‘Okay.’

      The woman shut her door.

      Alex swallowed. Her mouth was dry and her heart was thudding. She pressed her fist against her breastbone. ‘You can do this,’ she whispered. The enormity of her actions had just dawned on her. She was about to come face-to-face with the woman who was – whatever some bloody judge said – complicit in the murder of Harry and Millie. And she was supposed to be carrying out an interview with Jackie Wood when all she wanted to do was to shake out the answer to the question that had haunted her family for more than a decade – where was Millie buried?

      And why shouldn’t she? There was no need to talk to Jackie Wood for any length of time; she could even ditch the idea of an article. Nothing lost, except more of her dwindling savings. And she would have had the chance to ask her about Millie. On another level, Alex was curious about the woman; about what had made her tick then and what made her tick now. How she could sit and blatantly lie to everybody; the lies she was still continuing to tell now?

      Let out on a technicality. That was not innocence.

      Squaring her shoulders, she lifted her hand up to knock on the door.

      It opened before her hand made contact.

      ‘I saw you standing outside. Alex.’ Jackie Wood’s voice was pitched a little too high and had the soft Suffolk burr that Alex remembered from the courtroom – both characteristics had been blurred by the television microphones. What was more startling was that the long black hair she had seen on the screen was now cut short and dyed blonde. Jackie Wood was dressed in an off-white fluffy fleece, faded, ill-fitting black jeans, and brown slippers with pom-poms on the toes. She was even more diminished than she had seemed on television and her skin had not yet regained a healthy colour. Alex guessed the woman СКАЧАТЬ