The Half Sister, page 28
‘We read the piece by Jessica Linley in today’s Echo,’ she says.
Kate nods, not trusting herself to speak.
‘It’s a very moving story.’
‘Mmm,’ manages Kate.
‘I told them that Jess, Jessica, works here, but isn’t in today,’ offers Matt.
Kate’s eyes widen as she tries to read whether he’s telling the truth or not. It’s impossible to tell.
‘Mr Walker tells us you have a personal connection to Miss Linley,’ DS Connolly goes on.
‘Er, possibly,’ says Kate. ‘It’s a little contentious.’
As soon as she says it, she wants to claw it back in. You should never use the word ‘contentious’ when talking to the police – it opens up a whole host of questions.
DS Connolly raises her eyebrows in interest, as if proving the point. ‘Really?’ she asks. ‘In what way?’
Kate looks helplessly from one detective to another. ‘Can I just ask what this is about?’
‘We’re investigating cold cases,’ pipes up DC Stephens. ‘And this article has piqued our interest. We just wondered if we could ask you a couple of questions.’
Kate nods. ‘What’s the case?’ she asks, her voice wavering.
Stephens looks to his superior for permission to tell her. She gives a little nod.
‘We’re trying to trace a baby found abandoned in Harrogate in 1996,’ he says. ‘And Miss Linley says she was born there, around that time, to unknown parents. Is that true?’ asks DC Stephens.
‘It’s her truth,’ says Kate, as a heat creeps slowly up from her toes, burning her skin from the inside out as it travels.
‘What do you mean by that?’ steps in DS Connolly.
‘I mean, it’s what she believes to be true,’ says Kate. ‘It may not prove to be the case, but it’s what she believes, at this moment in time, given the information available to her.’
She wonders if she’s talking too much. Saying too many words when a few would be enough.
‘Are you familiar with the town at all?’
Kate nods, as pinpricks of sweat spring to every pore. ‘I spent my early childhood there,’ she says, trying to ignore the split-second glance between the two detectives.
‘Can I ask what time period that was?’ asks Stephens.
Kate looks up at the treble-height ceiling and the marble-wrapped pillars that hold it up. ‘Erm, I was born there in 1984 and left to come to London in 1996.’
‘So around the same time that Ms Linley was born?’ Stephens asks rhetorically. ‘Did you move down with your family?’
Kate’s fast losing the ability to talk, her throat feeling as if it’s closing in on itself.
‘Mmm.’
‘And your family are?’
‘Erm, there’s me, my sister, my mother and my late father.’
‘Can I just take down their names?’ asks Stephens, reaching into his back trouser pocket and pulling out a notebook.
She glances at Matt, whose unchanged features send a surge of calmness through her addled brain.
‘My sister is Lauren Carter, my mother is Rose, and my late father was Harry.’
‘And your parents’ surname?’ asks Stephens, with pen poised.
‘Do you mind if we sit down?’ asks Kate, feeling herself swaying.
‘She’s pregnant,’ says Matt, taking hold of her elbow and guiding her over to the modern leather couches that look far too small for the vast space. Kate watches as he goes to fetch her a glass of water, willing him to hurry up.
‘And as I understand it,’ Stephens goes on, ‘Miss Linley has uploaded her DNA onto a genealogy website and has discovered that she has a half sister. Would that be Mrs Carter?’
Kate nods.
‘And yourself, of course, though I notice you’re not referred to in the article.’
Kate stays silent.
‘Were you perhaps not quite as accepting of the situation as Ms Carter?’
‘Well, it’s not exactly ideal,’ admits Kate, coughing to clear her throat.
‘That your father was her father?’
‘Yes,’ says Kate quietly. ‘It’s not easy to accept that your father could have had an affair.’
‘Especially difficult to discover this after his passing, I must imagine,’ says Stephens, almost to himself.
Kate bristles at his clumsy attempt at sincerity.
‘But you accept it to be the case?’ asks Stephens.
‘I can’t argue with science,’ she says, smiling tightly.
Stephens returns her smile, though it doesn’t quite reach his eyes.
‘Do you have any reason to believe that your father knew of his third daughter’s existence?’
Yes. No. I don’t know. They all reverberate around her head on a loop, as her, Lauren’s and their mother’s different theories abound.
‘No,’ she says, because it feels the safest answer to give until she knows exactly what’s going on here. Relief floods through her as Matt returns and sits down next to her.
‘And you don’t remember the case of an abandoned baby when you were living in Harrogate at the time?’
‘No,’ she says honestly.
‘You would have been eleven or twelve?’ says Stephens, needlessly reminding her of her age.
‘That’s correct,’ she says.
‘And your sister, Lauren?’ says Stephens, referring to his notebook. ‘She’s a few years older than you.’
‘Yes, four.’ Kate is now worried that her answers are too short and clipped.
‘So, she might have some memory of it. Or indeed your mother, Mrs . . .’ He looks at his notebook. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch your parents’ surname.’
‘Alexander.’
‘And Mrs Alexander is still in London?’ DS Connolly asks.
Kate nods.
‘Can I get an address for her please? We might need to ask her a few questions too.’
‘About what?’ says Kate, her hackles rising as well as her heart rate.
‘We just need to eliminate everyone from our inquiries,’ says Stephens, sounding as if he’s reading from a script for a TV show.
‘Inquiries for what?’ chokes Kate. ‘What is it that you’re investigating exactly?’
DS Connolly looks at her. ‘A murder, Mrs Walker. We’re investigating a murder.’
46
Lauren
‘I’m truly sorry,’ says Justin, taking Lauren’s hand in his as they sit in a cafe at the foot of the Shard. ‘I had no idea I was talking to him.’
‘Why would you?’ she says, as she swipes her tears away, not knowing whether she’s crying for her marriage or the new life she’s about to embark on. ‘It’s my own stupid fault. I should never have let him anywhere near my phone.’ Though even as she’s saying it, she knows she had no choice.
Justin looks at her intently. ‘You never know, it might be a good thing.’
Lauren laughs cynically. ‘How can two parents breaking up ever be a good thing?’
‘Because he’s a violent bully, Lauren! You and the children are so much better off away from him.’
Lauren nods. In her head she knows he’s right but, despite herself, in her heart she’s still not sure she completely agrees with him.
‘I want to look after you, Lauren. If you want that too.’
‘I’ve got a lot to sort out, both practically and emotionally,’ says Lauren. ‘But in time, yes.’
‘We can figure that out. But first things first,’ says Justin. ‘Where are you and the children going to live?’
Lauren looks at him wide-eyed, suddenly overwhelmed by the enormity of the situation she’s in. There were practical reasons she’d stayed in a marriage so toxic; having a roof over her children’s heads was one of them.
‘I’m going to have to take some advice,’ she says, feeling fresh tears spring to her eyes when she realizes that her one true advocate is no longer here. How she wishes she could roll back a year, to when her dad was still alive. Or even better, roll back twenty-two years, to a time when she was daddy’s girl just as much as Kate was. Before she fell pregnant, before Justin left her, before she gave up their baby and blamed her dad for it all. Now she’s discovered that the resentment she’s been carrying around for all that time was misplaced. Yes, he may have had an affair and yes, it seems he had a baby with another woman, but that didn’t detract from the father he was to her – the father he tried so very hard to be, if only she’d let him. And now it’s too late.
He will never know how much she wished she’d gone into the office with him whenever he asked, instead of crying at home and regretting saying no. He will never know how much she’d have loved him to pop round to her place on his way home from a football match, instead of always going to Kate’s. He will never know her regret at not telling him she loved him when she naively believed she had all the time in the world.
‘Legal advice, you mean?’ asks Justin, bringing her back.
Lauren nods. ‘I can stay with Mum for a bit, but it’s not ideal, especially in the current circumstances, and Kate’s not got enough room for us all.’
‘Well, if you need somewhere to stay, there’s plenty of room at mine.’
Lauren looks at him as if he’s mad. ‘I can’t move myself and three children into yours. This isn’t your problem.’
‘Your problems are my problems. I want to help you in any way I can, and if the apartment isn’t right, and I understand why it might not be, let me find you somewhere to rent whilst you’re sorting yourself out.’
‘I’m not working at the moment,’ says Lauren. ‘I can’t afford to rent anywhere.’
‘So let me help you then, at least until you’re back on your feet.’
‘Justin, that’s very kind of you, but honestly I don’t need you to—’
‘I want to,’ he says, taking her hand in his. ‘This could be a new beginning for both of us—’
Lauren’s phone interrupts him and she looks at him apologetically. ‘I’m sorry, I need to get this,’ she says. She walks out of the cafe, sidestepping the bodies that are dispersing from London Bridge station.
‘Hi,’ she says, as she teeters on the kerb.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Kate.
‘Getting there. You?’
‘Yeah, listen, something’s come up and I wondered if you could get across to Canary Wharf?’
Lauren instinctively looks at her watch, though she doesn’t know why. ‘What now?’ she says.
‘Yes, if you can. It’s important.’
It doesn’t occur to Lauren to ask any more questions. Mostly out of fear of what the answers will be. She’s not quite sure how much more she can take at the moment.
‘Listen, I need to go,’ she says to Justin when she walks back into the cafe.
‘Is everything all right?’ he asks. ‘Do you want me to come with you? I don’t want you having to face him on your own.’
‘It’s not Simon,’ she says. ‘It’s Kate. I’ll call you later.’
Lauren wonders, as she goes the three stops on the Jubilee line, what Kate has to say that’s so important. She hopes she’s not going to slate their father, because for the first time, Lauren doesn’t want to hear it. She’s spent all these years waiting for everyone else to feel the way she did, but now that they do, she wishes they didn’t. Kate, on the other hand, has had all the good things she thought about her father turned upside down. The irony of how they’ve changed sides isn’t lost on her.
Lauren walks into the intimidating lobby at the Echo offices fifteen minutes later, feeling instantly out of place. This isn’t where she wants to be, no matter how much she’d tried to convince herself that it was. It had felt so glamorous whenever Kate talked about it, but in reality, it feels threatening and highly pressured. Seeing Kate waving from the corner eases her anxiety.
‘What’s going on?’ she says as confidently as she can as she approaches the group of four.
‘Lauren, this is DS Connolly and DC Stephens,’ says Kate. ‘They’re . . .’
‘Thank you . . .’ says Connolly, cutting Kate off. ‘They’re just preliminary inquiries at the moment, Mrs Carter, but we’d like to ask you some questions all the same.’
‘Of course,’ says Lauren, looking at Kate wide-eyed, trying to read her mind.
‘They’re investigating the murder of a woman in Harrogate in 1996,’ says Kate quickly, in answer to her silent questioning.
Lauren’s palms instantly go clammy.
‘The article implies that you uploaded your DNA onto a genealogy site,’ says Stephens. ‘Did you know that you might have another sibling?’
‘N-no,’ stutters Lauren. ‘I was just doing it for a bit of fun, really. I didn’t have any expectations other than perhaps building our family tree.’
‘So you were surprised when Miss Linley showed as a match?’
Not remotely, she wants to say, but instead says, ‘Absolutely.’
‘So it didn’t occur to you that your dad, Mr Harry Alexander, might have fathered another child?’
‘No,’ she says, feeling sick. ‘Not at all.’
The two detectives look at each other, making Lauren feel as if they know everything already and are just seeing how long it takes her to admit it.
‘Did your father have any violent tendencies?’ asks DS Connolly, bringing her back.
‘Now, hang on a minute,’ says Kate, answering on Lauren’s behalf. ‘Whatever’s going on here has got absolutely nothing to do with my father.’
Lauren looks, panic-stricken, between her sister and the officer.
‘I’m sure it hasn’t,’ says DS Connolly. ‘But, as we said, we need to eliminate everyone from our inquiries.’
‘No,’ says Lauren, truthfully. ‘Never.’
Stephens jots down Lauren’s answer in his notebook.
‘I’m sorry, can you tell me more about what this is all about?’ says Lauren, finally finding her voice. She will not allow assumptions to be made about her father. She’s made enough of those for everyone.
‘Back in 1996, a woman was attacked in her own home, sustained serious head injuries and died shortly after,’ says DS Connolly.
‘And you think Jess is her baby?’ Lauren asks, instinctively.
She knows, even before the two detectives look at each other with raised eyebrows, what she’s done.
‘Her baby?’ asks Stephens through narrowed eyes,
‘The woman’s baby,’ she says, feeling an oppressive heat bearing down on her. ‘Didn’t you say she had a baby?’ Kate’s eyes are burning into her.
‘Her baby was found abandoned shortly after the murder,’ says Stephens. ‘May I ask how you knew that the victim had a baby?’
Lauren’s eyes flicker from the detective to Kate and back again. ‘I . . . we . . . Jess and I went up there . . . earlier this week.’
‘What for?’ asks DS Connolly.
‘We just thought it might be a good idea to go back and knock on a few doors to see if anyone remembered my dad or Jess. We just wanted to see if we could find something that might lead us to Jess’s mum.’
‘And did you?’
‘We spoke with someone who told us about the Woods family,’ offers Lauren. ‘They said he’d killed his wife and disappeared.’
DS Connolly raises her eyebrows. ‘That was one theory, but there are other lines of inquiry we need to pursue.’
‘Why?’ says Lauren. ‘It seems everyone knew that he was violent – he had previous, and then he disappeared immediately after his wife’s murder. It couldn’t be any more clear-cut, could it?’
‘Mr Woods has since been cleared of any involvement,’ says Connolly, and Lauren feels like she’s suddenly teetering on a precipice. She tries to stop the internal swaying that’s threatening to knock her off balance.
‘Since when?’ she manages, her tongue feeling as if it’s too big for her mouth.
‘Since he returned to the UK two years after the murder and provided DNA and an alibi,’ says Connolly.
‘So why wait until now to trawl it all up again?’ asks Lauren.
‘Well, we’d always believed the abandoned baby to be that of Mr Woods, but if it comes to pass that it isn’t, then we’ve got a whole new motive on our hands.’
Lauren catches Kate closing her eyes.
‘So, what are you going to do now?’ asks Lauren.
‘We need to talk to Miss Linley to see if she would be willing to have her DNA analysed against that of Julia Woods,’ says Stephens. ‘And then we’ll confirm the match between Miss Linley and your father, just to be sure.’
‘And if it’s proven that Jess is their daughter?’ asks Matt.
‘Then it looks like we might not only have a new motive, but a new suspect,’ says Connolly.
47
Kate
‘Kate! Kate! Can you hear me?’ says Matt.
It sounds like he’s calling her from miles away, yet she can see the outline of his face, the colour of his eyes as he draws in close to her.
‘Do you need to go to the hospital?’ asks a woman’s voice. It doesn’t sound like Lauren’s, but Kate so desperately wants it to be. Otherwise it will mean that she didn’t dream what just happened.
‘Do you want me to call an ambulance?’ asks the same voice, and her heart falls into her stomach. It’s not Lauren. It’s DS Connolly, and any notion of her having imagined their conversation is thwarted.
‘N-no, I’m fine,’ Kate manages. ‘I’m honestly fine.’
‘Okay, maybe we can wrap this up now,’ says Matt, but Kate doesn’t know who he’s saying it to. She just looks around aimlessly at all the faces peering into the bubble that she’s created around herself.
‘Of course,’ says DS Connolly. ‘We’ll be on our way, just as long as Mrs Walker is okay.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ says Matt.
Kate’s head is thumping as she’s helped up from the floor and sat back in the chair she can’t even remember falling out of. Lauren takes hold of her hand as they sit huddled on the sofa, watching the officers retreat.
‘What the hell’s going on?’ asks Lauren breathlessly. ‘What are they trying to imply? That Dad’s got something to do with it?’ She laughs nervously. ‘As if. Surely all fingers have got to point to the woman’s husband. He’d been violent before – their neighbour told me that the police were called several times.’
